HP Prime - worthy successor to HP-71B ?

[Garth Wilson]

In the 1980's I typed a lot on my 71, but eased up when they discontinued it and I realized that if I wore out the keyboard, I wouldn't be able to get a replacement. I typed minutes in meetings, typed memos, letters, etc. (when most people did not have email yet, and circulating a memo meant printing it on my ThinkJet printer and going to the photocopier). I had 160KB of RAM, (I wanted the 256KB card-reader port RAM, but it was beyond my budget), and a full-featured text editor I wrote that made heavy use of some great LEX files developed by the user groups. Although I had the 80-column video interface and monitor, I wrote the text editor to specifically optimize usage for the one-line LCD, for portable use. Even though it's like looking at your work through a keyhole, it works surprisingly well if you can move that keyhole very nimbly around your work.

I was able to type at 30wpm on the 71, about 60% of the speed I could do on a full-sized keyboard. For programming, yes, the shortcut keys do help, but I did a lot of key re-assignments too, for the things I used most, and had different KEYS files for various jobs, along with their accompanying overlays. So considering the size of the 71, I would say it was no slouch for typing speed.