The star on the HP-15C's display screen

[Bill (Smithville NJ)]

(09-25-2015 03:44 PM)kusmi Wrote:  

(09-25-2015 12:26 PM)Didier Lachieze Wrote:  It's the Low Battery indicator.

It's really puzzling - why didn't HP just use a battery symbol to make it more clear :-)

I would have understood to just make a "dot" if there are problems manufacturing a complicated shape - but the star is equally complex than a battery symbol...

Since the line is a "character" line, I would guess using the asterisk Character was easier to do than trying to create a special symbol.

Of course the real manufacturing defect was creating a calculator that can run for 15 years before requiring a battery change. That means the user will only see this symbol very few times so the user easily forgets what the symbol means. Now if they had just put in a battery drain circuit so that the symbol would appear more often (such as every few weeks or month) then every user would learn what this symbol means. And the battery manufacturers would have been happier selling many more batteries. It obviously was just poor design to allow for such long operation on one set of batteries.

Bill (Tongue firmly placed in cheek)
Smithville, NJ