Another red dot calculator

[Palmer O. Hanson Jr.]

I was looking through my collection of TI calculators and I discovered that the DATAMATH's show a red bar beside the switch when the switch is in the ON position! Do you suppose that is a coincidence?

Here's something else that TI and HP did in a sImilar manner back in those days -- both the TI DATAMATH's and the HP Classics used a "bath tub" typef of battery compartment which prevented cell leakage from damaging the circuitry. As result my three early model DATAMATH's which used six hard-wired rechargeable cells and three of my six HP Classics show evidence of substantial cell leakage but no circuit damage. In subsequent designs both manufacturers abandoned that common sense approach with the result that circuit damage would typically result if cell leakage occurred. Why would they have done that when their earliest models show that the knew better?

Palmer O. Hanson Jr.

[Jake Schwartz]

[quote]Why would they have done that when their earliest models show that they knew better?[quote]

I would bet that it has something to do with employee turnover and the advantages of that configuration not having been recorded somewhere in a "must-have" feature list. I believe that this very thing happened on a much larger scale when Chris Wallin attempted to resurrect HP calculators as the Australian Calculator Operation in 1997 and virtually all of the previous calc team had already been scattered into the wind. The question is rhetorical, but how do the important lessons learned get passed on from one group of developers to the next? And if they do, does the successor group possibly tend to downgrade their importance, due to mitigating factors like cost? (Double injection-molded keys immediately comes to mind...) As Richard Nelson has said too many times, the manufacturer is in a constant state of change while only the user community stays constant (if we stubbornly choose to remain devoted to the products). <sigh>

Thanks,
Jake