HP Calculator Highlights since the 1980

[pier4r]

(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

For the little understanding that I collected, I think that the RPL was designed as natural evolution of RPN, that was the core of most if not all HP calculators. I guess the idea was exactly to retain the user base while moving on something a bit more expressive.
The problem is that while RPN and RPL are easier for the calculator to execute, as the parsing of a statement is mostly done by the user, they are harder to read and use (more info: here ).

What surprises me though is the recent realization that the HP did a quite great math environment equipped with basic, the 71B (and the 75 if I am not mistaken). The 71B was also based on the saturn chip that then was improved and used in the 48 series.
So while I appreciate the work on RPL, that is quite a nice language but frustrating to learn at first, I don't understand why they didn't continue with the 71B basic.
I do not own a 71B, but as far as I read the 71B basic is even more readable than ti basic. Could be that with it HP could have dominated the calculator market in general.

Anyway, now they made the Prime also as smartphone app, they couldn't do a better move in my opinion.