HP-41C List of "over 130 functions"?

[Thomas Okken]

I think this is down to a combination of errors accumulating between the people who designed the calculators and those who wrote the manuals and promotional materials, combined with insufficient fact-checking of the final result. I remember being a bit irked by this at the time; it seemed so pointless to exaggerate the capabilities of the HP-41C when the capabilities that it did have where so impressive already.

I no longer have the prospectuses from back then, but I do know of an even greater exaggeration regarding the HP-42S. In the MoHPC page for this calculator, it is mentioned that it has "over 600 functions," which, if memory serves, is something that comes out of the original promotional materials. I remember scratching my head when I saw that the FCN catalog had only 252 entries, and the function index at the back of the manual, while longer, still didn't even have half of those mythical 600 entries.

I can see how "127" could turn into "almost 130" or "about 130" and then "130" and finally "over 130," but how does "252" become "over 600"?

In a much less dramatic, but still telling example, the HP-42S manual states that the calculator has "over 7,200 bytes of memory for storing programs and data." As any hard-core 42S user knows, right after Memory Clear, MEM reports 6977 bytes free, and when you delete REGS, it reports 7200 exactly. So that's the number you get with an empty stack, no variables, and no programs... and yet, someone felt compelled to turn this into "over 7200."

TL;DR Take such numbers with a grain of salt...