HP Calculator Highlights since the 1980

[rprosperi]

(04-01-2018 01:55 PM)Maximilian Hohmann Wrote:  But I can see a development there. In the 80ies it was decisions from the mathematics geniuses (not engineers and certainly not marketing people for sure) who put HP calculators onto that RPL track which moved them away from the all-important education market and from a big portion of their "fan base" for good. After that, the marketing department took over and went for fancy colours instead of fancy programming paradigms ;-) (Personally I prefer the silliest paint scheme over a decently painted RPL calculator though).

When the 28 and 48 RPL series were designed, Engineers and Math professionals were still the driving high-end calculator market, Education had barely started using calculators in the classroom. As the Education market evolved and grew, they found the easier to learn and use Algebraic models more appropriate and adopted them, and then well... the former market shrunk, the latter market grew and we all know how it turned out.

So I don't think its fair to say that introducing RPL took HP away from the Education market, it likely is more correct to say that as the Education Market developed and grew, HP was busy focused on other explosive market segment growth (InkJet printers, computers) and also randomly moving the Calculator group to a new continent every 2 years, and by the time they re-focused properly, they were too far behind to play. That is, until the Prime, which could still prove to be a game changer, albeit slowly.