Question about HP71B Variable Names

[Valentin Albillo]

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Hi, Garth:

(01-19-2021 01:48 AM)Garth Wilson Wrote:  Do you have any speed comparisons, for different types of benchmarks? I know it was slower for something like a FOR...NEXT loop (probably because the 75 had a wider data bus), but I think the 71 was much, much faster in math that involved the math module.

I conducted pretty exhaustive speed comparisons at the time (~35 years ago, now lost) because I had to evaluate whether the HP-75C could be useful to develop and sell our commercial engineering software for it or else the HP-71B would be preferable (significantly lower price though still very expensive).

I eventually concluded that the HP-75C was much faster in general, period, but in the end we discarded them both because their price and capabilities meant too few sales and so it wasn't profitable for us to develop our software for them, as engineer firms would rather buy it for the much more capable HP-85/86/87.

Quote:The two computers had approximately the same clock speed, but the 71 could address eight times as much memory [...]

Most of it is correct (the registers' sizes are not) but nevertheless the HP-75C was at a minimum 2x faster than the HP-71B, usually 3x-4x faster in practice. Alas, the 71 was nevertheless much much faster than the HP-41C but at 5x-6x the price, so very few people bought it.

Quote:I wrote my very capable text editor [...] to include a lot of great LEX files from the Paris users' group, material that was published in the CHHU Chronicle.

Certainly. The HP-75C was a clunker, I never liked it, too big and heavy, too little RAM, a one-line display (while inexpensive SHARP models had 4 lines x 40 characters and pixel-addressable graphics), ultra-expensive, a complete failure that never sold here (Spain). I've never seen anyone own it and I never wrote a program for it other than the benchmarks. It simply had no appeal for me nor anyone else, it seems.

The HP-71B on the other hand, I loved instantly and people developed tons of excellent software and language extensions for it, but in Spain it also didn't sell at all. I saw a few (you could count'em with the fingers of one hand, with some to spare) owned by wealthy engineers and that's all, no market to profitably develop anything commercial for it.

And slow as molasses when compared to something like an HP-85/86/87 or even a lowly IBM PC running a Turbo-Pascal compiled executable. Plus the 1-line 22-char display was a big no-no.

Regards.
V.