Kahan interview on HP calculators

[J-F Garnier]

(11-13-2021 01:41 PM)John Keith Wrote:  

(11-13-2021 07:57 AM)EdS2 Wrote:  ... there's a 200 page oral history which looks fascinating.

It is. When I downloaded it I started reading it- and read the whole thing!

If you don't want to read it all, the section about Kahan's work as HP consultant starts at page 144.

Kahan talks about the reasons and the conditions of the accuracy improvement of early models (the well-known 2^3 problem, see this discussion), I didn't know he was involved in that.

But Kahan says (p.147) that the first HP with the improved accuracy was the HP-27, maybe wasn't it the first to be released?
Or it may be a mistake, because Kahan then speaks about the "top row of the calculator’s keyboard, they had these five keys: n, i, pv, pmt, and fe." that are more or less the 5 top keys of the HP-22, not the HP-27.

Also it is clear that the Kahan's improvements of the financial equation solver lead the path to the general solver introduced in the 34C.

There are some mentions of the HP-71B and the connection with the IEEE-854 draft standard, on pages 196-197.

J-F