HP Calculator Highlights since the 1980

[Maximilian Hohmann]

(04-01-2018 02:21 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  So I don't think its fair to say that introducing RPL took HP away from the Education market, ...

Of course not, there were many other contributing factors too. In the 1970ies when calculators started to appear in classrooms (I got my first one around 1976 or so) it was their high prices - at least in Europe - which kept HP products out of the classrooms. RPN didn't help much either because (almost) every other manufacturer did not go that way and teachers wouldn't have liked to teach 1/2 of the students RPN and the other half algebraic depending on what the parents could afford to buy their children. We all had different calculators in my class at school but nobody had one from HP.

But RPL cost them most of the university market, at least around here. Especially in the engineering departments where they could have sold big numbers of units. As I wrote in another thread, a calculator is one tool among others and a tool which requires to study 1500 pages of manual and which I can't borrow to a colleague without a weekend's worth of explanation was considered pretty useless by many (me included).