Most common calculators in the forum?

[Sylvain Cote]

(12-02-2017 01:01 AM)Dave Frederickson Wrote:  So, Sylvain, you have an extensive HP collection. Which models do you consider common and/or popular?

I am a technical person and I do not have an insider view on the business models so I will leave this space to peoples like Gene Wright who knows way better than me these models.

Here is my list of the most important and sold RPN/RPL technical calculators:

1. HP-35 (Feb 1972 to Feb 1975, v1/v2/v3/v4, RPN, 300+ thousands units sold)
   First hand held scientific calculator, instantly puts the slide rule in retirement.
   It was very pricey, but for the technical peoples it was a game changer and they bought it like crazy.
2. HP-65 (Jan 1974 to Jan 1977, RPN, I have no clue of how many units were sold)
   First hand held scientific programmable, card reader, huge library of programs.
   Lots of peoples learned programming with this model and its successor the HP-67 (Jul 1976 to Jan 1982, RPN).
3. HP-41 (C/CV/CX, Aug 1979 to Nov 1991, RPN, 1+ million units sold)
   First hand held alpha-numerical LCD, hugely customizable, plug-in modules, peripherals, etc.
   Another game changer, instantly killed the competition, very popular among the surveyors.
4. HP-48 (S/SX/G/GX/G+, Mar 1990 to 2003, RPL, no clue on how many unit sold but I expect it to be big)
   Big LCD, symbolic calculation, very versatile, could be extended (SX/GX) through add-on cards.
   The HP-28C was the first to brings the symbolic calculation to the hand held calculator world, but it was the 48S/SX that democratized it, again, very popular among the surveyors.
   

The others models suffer from medium to short production life with no expandability. I can only see them in path, like:

• HP-21 -> HP-31E -> HP-10C
• HP-25 -> HP-33E -> HP-11C -> HP-32S/SII -> HP-33S -> HP-35S
• HP-29C -> HP-34C -> HP-15C -> HP-42S
• etc
  

I would have loved to list the HP-71B here, but I cannot.
Although it was a technical marvel, its limited initial memory size and landscape format made it a hard sell to field peoples.
Compared to other BASIC landscape models from the competition, its 1 line LCD was desastrous (ex.: Sharp PC-1600).
Its end price, once you brought it up to its full potential, put it out of reach of many potential buyers.
It may had been a relatively big success if HP did not killed it so soon (3.5 years).

As for the Prime, I am not qualified to make a good evaluation.
I have one, play a little bit with it, but its definitively not for me, it feels more like a vertical computer with a keyboard than a calculator.

If I had to be the system designer of a computer/calculator hybrid, I will use a smart phone as the software platform and design a physical keyboard that will partially wrapped over it.
With something like that you have the maximum software flexibility while retaining the physical keyboard.
The manufacturer only have to make the keyboards and the softwares that adapt to peoples smartphone they already have.
My armchair quarterbacks 2 cents view

My personal choices are:

• HP-41CX -> RPN king of expandability
  Still usable today, thanks to Monte Dalrymple (41CL boards), Diego Diaz (Clonix/NoV modules), Ángel Martin (countless modules) and others who still make software for the thing.
• HP-48GX -> the power of RPL and until recently still commercially available through the HP-50G
  Thanks to Claudio Lapilli for his gigantic and still ongoing work on the newRPL project.
• HP-71B -> the most powerful BASIC hand-held computer
  Thanks to Hans Brueggemann for his huge memory upgrade (FRAM71/FRAM71B)
  

Sylvain

edit: add hand held to all items in the first list