42th anniversary of HP-35?

[Mike Morrow]

(06-23-2014 06:48 AM)HP67 Wrote:  That's an implementation problem, not an indictment of emulation. Maybe the emulation just isn't good enough.

You miss the fundamental problem. No one ever wrote an emulation layer between old firmware and new hardware that did NOT result in a system running many times slower than the same system would have, had new firmware native to the new hardware been used. You missed the very concrete example of the Savage benchmark running eight times slower on the HP-15C emulated on an ARM, compared to running on the HP 30b whose firmware is programmed native to a very similar ARM with similar clock speed. The HP-15C old firmware emulation on the HP-15C LE will take about eight times as long to produce a rather inferior result and use eight times the battery energy to achieve that. Were the HP-15C emulation perfect and perfectly optimal, there would doubtless be some improvement, but also gross difference in benchmark speed remaining. We are NOT talking about emulating a calculator on a PC...that's completely unrelated and irrelevant. Emulation of a calculator on calculator hardware is always very inefficient.

Quote:The old HP 48 would be as good as ever with a faster processor.

True, as long as there is little expectation attached to the phrase "good as ever". I own and have used the original HP 48SX and HP 48GX since first introduction. The performance and versatility of each is grossly inferior to the HP 50G...or even the infamous HP 49G+. Were they sped up with a processor upgrade, they would remain terribly limited machines that were now simply faster.

I do not understand the worshipful attitude that some have for earlier HP calculators, which seems to begin as soon as they are no longer sold by HP. I've used HPs since the first HP-35 units showed up at Georgia Tech in Spring 1972. For the most part, worship is undeserved. The 26-year-old HP-42S came closest to being a perfect machine...yet even it still had a long long way to go.