an allure & cult following Message #10 Posted by glynn on 17 Oct 2001, 10:02 p.m., in response to message #1 by Gene
Personally, I would choose to answer the questions themselves, which are:
1. What is the allure of the H-P calculator?
2. Why do the calculators have a cult following?
In answering the things the poor writer is trying to write about, perhaps enough of your opinion will make it through his mental sieve to get on paper...
...but negativism and defeatism smell bad. Sure it's the story you or I might write, because it has meaning (direct consequence) to our own lives. But the effect you desire (to make someone care enough to change the future) is not done with dark pictures of lost pasts and endangered species-- you can't make anyone really *care* UNTIL they want to be a part of the "cult", too.
So I'm suggesting you be a cheerleader. Mention the feel of those keys as they click... nothing else made like a classic HP calc keyboard. Mention the sophisticated looks of a strictly professionally-oriented tool, made for the job. Talk about the reliabiity and lasting quality built into the best of these babies; from multi-shot molded key legends to extraordinary ruggedness that saw many of us through CAREERS.
The precision appeal of a BMW or Mercedes in a pocket-device: HP's high initial prices made them a bit of a conspicuous show of wealth to some, but no one would deny that, once you owned one, you'd never go back to anything else. The service of dealers and the company in its heyday was exactly as befitted an audience of professionals, from architects to engineers to CPAs, graduate students and statisticians. You can take your favorite HP and heft it in your hand and describe all that made you starve for a month until you could afford to own one of your own...
Talk about collecting and rehabilitating old calculators, so they live again and look as beautiful as they should. Or of their value as a collectible-- what others throw out bringing a nice price, because nothing else made now compares. How collecting calcs contrasts a time when purposeful tools could be understood and their usefulness grasped nearly completely... and yet these are the step-programmmable things that some of us learned which acclimated us to Computers and Programming concepts themselves.
And the stories Dave collects, in the Memories section, tell of 15c batteries that last years... and modifications to a CALCULATOR that remind one of racing-enthusiasts poking under the hoods of their GTOs. The looks and odd reactions of others trying their Algebraic fingers on your suitably unapologetic RPN genie (heh heh). The cult following, and the allure, of HP calculators is unmistakable and, once you've learned your calc's ways, unavoidable!!! But you've gotta experience it for yourself, or in the case of this article somebody is writing, you've gotta make them feel like they might like the experience, too.
If many more people had learned to savor the VALUES that made HP calcs so great, some company (maybe even HP) would be there to market machines to that hungry crowd. A "cult" is, by definition, a rather small group, operating in a limited time of its own; I prefer to think the Religion of dedicated, well-built, premium tools and their savvy practitioners has a widespread and eternal appeal. But it would do us much good to evangelize!
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