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Thomas Radtke · 03-18-2015, 05:03 PM

I'd go for a used 17BII (Pioneer). They are cheap to come by, much better than a 12C, nicer to handle than a (expensive) 19BII, less bugs than a 30b.

Anderson Costa · 03-18-2015, 08:01 PM

(03-18-2015 04:52 PM)Tim Wessman Wrote: I'd vote for the 10bII+. Then again, I made the thing so am rather biased. Algebraic only, but for convenience and power both you can't beat the price.

An algebraic Financial calculator is better for me,Tim...
The HP 12C has RPN, and this fact makes various Brazilian students loves it.
What is the differences between the HP 10BII+ and HP 17BII???

Blendama · (This post was last modified: 03-18-2015 08:44 PM by Blendama.)

(03-18-2015 04:52 PM)Tim Wessman Wrote: I'd vote for the 10bII+. Then again, I made the thing so am rather biased. Algebraic only, but for convenience and power both you can't beat the price.

Tim, I'd agree that the 10bii+ is a capable calculator but the lack of RPN is a huge negative to me. Tsk, tsk, tsk Wink

Blendama · 03-18-2015, 08:51 PM

Someone commented on the 19Bii's battery door.

Back in 2003 I was starting MBA school and thought I'd treat myself to a 19Bii. I purchased it new online and received one of the new ones with the revised battery door. While the door is definitely a better design, the rest of the calculator was poorly manufactured.

The keys changed from grey/taupe to black. They were loose and rattled. It was also made in Indonesia which is why I have a negative view of all Indonesian made calcs (I know, I should keep an open mind!)

I returned it and bought an older one off ebay. NIB. Made with high quality Singaporean craftsmanship! Smile

I use the calc daily so that's more important than the door which I'll only access every few years. Plus we all know how to change clamshell batteries so it's not an issue for me.

So while I do love the 19Bii, id rate older units > units with new battery door

Thomas Radtke · 03-19-2015, 06:22 AM

(03-18-2015 08:01 PM)Anderson Costa Wrote: What is the differences between the HP 10BII+ and HP 17BII???

Completely different machines. The 10BII+ comes with an extensive set of statistics/scientific functions. Operating it is quite complex as there are many hidden functions. It comes with a quick start guide only and is not programmable.

The 17BII is easy to use with a programmable equation solver. It's RPN only and usually you'll get a printed manual.

I like the 10BII+ too, but can't recommend it to a beginner, especially not for a course in financial math.

Massimo Gnerucci · 03-19-2015, 07:26 AM

(03-19-2015 06:22 AM)Thomas Radtke Wrote: The 17BII (...) It's RPN only

What? ;)

Thomas Radtke · 03-19-2015, 07:51 AM

(03-19-2015 07:26 AM)Massimo Gnerucci Wrote: What?

Hehe, used it for many months but have not noticed it's Alg/RPN. I missed nothing.

TASP · 03-21-2015, 06:40 PM

The smoldering classic sexiness of the HP80 is hard to match.

bshoring · 03-21-2015, 06:53 PM

My favorite is the long discontinued HP-38C.
It has the functionality of a 12C (minus bonds
& depreciation) but in a vertical format that
I can hold comfortably in the palm of my
hand. Plus the wonderful red LED display.
I got about 20 good years out of it.

Bob

Ken Shaw · 03-26-2015, 02:02 PM

+1 for the HP17BII (not the II+). As long as you don't need trig functions and specialized programming.

Nice because it's either Alg or RPN, so has wide appeal. Accuracy may not be up to modern standards but more than sufficient for business purposes. It's easily better than the more popular 12C which it replaced.

If the 27S had been RPN, it would have been the killer calc (again, not for the 50g crowd--they are a whole different species), but HP never went there.

Don Shepherd · 03-26-2015, 02:53 PM

(03-26-2015 02:02 PM)Ken Shaw Wrote: +1 for the HP17BII (not the II+). As long as you don't need trig functions and specialized programming.

Agree with trig functions, but you can do a lot with the 17bii solver since it has decision and looping functions. It is not keystroke programming, like the 12c, but in its own way it is very powerful.

Jeff_Kearns · (This post was last modified: 03-26-2015 03:46 PM by Jeff_Kearns.)

(03-26-2015 02:02 PM)Ken Shaw Wrote: +1 for the HP17BII (not the II+). As long as you don't need trig functions and specialized programming.

The first thing I did with my HP-17BII was add the W. B. Maguire II trigonometric and reverse trig equations into the solver. There are several excellent trig and inverse trig equation options in the old HP Articles Forum, but I like these the best for my purposes.

Jeff

W.B.Grant · 05-05-2015, 08:53 PM

(03-18-2015 04:52 PM)Tim Wessman Wrote: I'd vote for the 10bII+. Then again, I made the thing so am rather biased. Algebraic only, but for convenience and power both you can't beat the price.

I'll second that. I use it a fair bit for quoting equipment and costing projects, for which it is very well designed.

The name-dropping cred from being on the same web forum as the designer of the device is an added bonus Wink

Tim Wessman · 05-05-2015, 09:47 PM

(05-05-2015 08:53 PM)W.B.Grant Wrote: The name-dropping cred from being on the same web forum as the designer of the device is an added bonus

Well, I don't know if I count as the "designer" completely. Specifically, I did the software (heavily based on Cyrille's work with the 20/30b), figured out the final keyboard layout and positioning, made the key font in the manual, created the graphics for the keyboard printing and the LCD masking, stole the section about probabilities from an earlier HP manual, and did a lot of proofreading. :-)

I didn't design the physical aspect or electronics at all.

**Gene** · 05-05-2015, 09:54 PM

Don't believe Tim. He did a GREAT job with the 10bII+.

It's a great mix of financial, math and statistical functionality in a device that continues the legacy keystroke support for all previous 10b models.

Well done!

Gene

Dave Britten · 05-05-2015, 10:14 PM

Yeah, the 10bii+ is really nice, with one big 'if': you have to be okay with algebraic/infix entry. But that's part of the 10b pedigree, so not a regression or anything. I was pretty impressed with the presence of (limited) list-based stats, and not just the usual summation registers.

On a related note, I'm getting a good deal of use from my 200LX right now as I work on refinancing our house. Still have yet to see a better financial handheld or portable spreadsheet. I was analyzing some amorts over a gourmet lunch at McDonald's today. It's too bad it doesn't have much compatibility with the 82240 printers. The loan expert at the bank was already amazed enough at the old palmtop; I would have really blown his mind if I had set up a wireless printer on his desk.

TASP · 05-05-2015, 11:22 PM

Don't mean to derail the topic, but with really enormous numbers being used in the government and media in descriptions of large financial deals and policies, is there a need behind the scenes for the actual 'bean counters' to have access to machines with greater precision than we typically see with our HPs ??

Would 20 digit precision be sufficient (assuming accurate algorithms coded into the machine) for computing the debits and credits of a really large pension system, perhaps handling 10s of trillions coming in and going out over the next 30 to 50 years ??

Or do even the most conservative and OCD of the bean counters find 10 digits and scientific notation sufficiently accurate for noodling out such enormous sums ??

Dave Britten · 05-05-2015, 11:56 PM

(05-05-2015 11:22 PM)TASP Wrote: Don't mean to derail the topic, but with really enormous numbers being used in the government and media in descriptions of large financial deals and policies, is there a need behind the scenes for the actual 'bean counters' to have access to machines with greater precision than we typically see with our HPs ??

Would 20 digit precision be sufficient (assuming accurate algorithms coded into the machine) for computing the debits and credits of a really large pension system, perhaps handling 10s of trillions coming in and going out over the next 30 to 50 years ??

Or do even the most conservative and OCD of the bean counters find 10 digits and scientific notation sufficiently accurate for noodling out such enormous sums ??

You raise an interesting point. Anecdote time.

We used to have this really old "report" program at work. It was just a simple Delphi program, written well before my hire date, that could run text files containing a report definition (really no more than a title, an ODBC data source name, and an SQL query), and dump the reports to Excel, slowly, via COM. We had a ton of reports for this thing, and it was used by sales, purchasing, accounting, management, etc.

One of the accounting reports would simply list all the AP checks from our ERP system. The AP head would run this periodically - monthly, I think - and upload this list to the bank, as a means of fraud detection. (i.e. do our cleared checks match the ones we think we wrote?)

This had been used for a number of years, but one day, it was suddenly off by about 2-3¢. And yet running the SQL query manually produced the correct results. We quickly isolated a single check in the output that was showing the wrong total when run with our reporter. The question of why still remained, though.

Miraculously, I was able to dig up the source code for the report tool in some alcove of our IT file share. Perhaps just as miraculously, I also managed to find the installation media for the version of Delphi it was built in. (Delphi was already pretty dated even when this happened around 2007, and this was written in some old version like Delphi 4.) So I cracked open the code that handled dumping the results to Excel, and found a case statement that would deposit cell values into Excel based on the data type of the column retrieved from the query. And wouldn't you know it, the tool was retrieving the value into a single-precision float variable!

This was apparently the largest AP check we had ever written since we started using this particular report; I don't remember the exact amount, but it was large enough to overflow the precison of a single, and Delphi happily rounded the result by a few cents. After a quick code change to replace the variable with something like a double or fixed-point decimal, our list of checks matched, and we all hoped we'd never have to touch the source code of that warty little thing again.

So your concern is not limited to the realm of incomprehensibly obscene amounts of money. Smile

(I think we ended up having to fix at least one other small problem with that reporter, though damned if I can remember what it was.)

TASP · 05-06-2015, 12:53 AM

Thanks for that. I can imagine 'bean counters' stroking out over even trifling sums if the cause of the discrepancy is unknown.

And in iterative calculations, I'm thinking even 'non-obscene' amounts of money might start building up round off errors, and if 2 differing machines yielded differing errors, I can imagine some of the accounting staff running into the night, screaming and pulling their hair out.

Dave Britten · 05-06-2015, 11:07 AM

(05-06-2015 12:53 AM)TASP Wrote: Thanks for that. I can imagine 'bean counters' stroking out over even trifling sums if the cause of the discrepancy is unknown.

And in iterative calculations, I'm thinking even 'non-obscene' amounts of money might start building up round off errors, and if 2 differing machines yielded differing errors, I can imagine some of the accounting staff running into the night, screaming and pulling their hair out.

Definitely. Fortunately, SQL Server supports up to 38 digits for the fixed-point decimal data type, with a selectable decimal point position. Using 38 digits costs 17 bytes per value, though. Most of our databases use 19 digits with 5 after the decimal point, 19 being the most you can get for 9 bytes.