Collecting old garbage, are you all crazy? Message #13 Posted by Nenad Vulic (Croatia) on 5 Mar 2002, 3:59 a.m., in response to message #3 by Ellis Easley
This is so simple. We, calculator collectors are just RIGHT and the rest of the world is just WRONG.
AFAIK, most of us have had our first encounters with HPcalc's when they were on the top of their implementation. We appreciated the way they were made and tested, as well as the RPN concept itself, as a normal natural way of thinking and crunching complicated expressions. It was completely natural and easy approach.
Several years ago, when I was working on my MSc and PhD theses I had the same mentor (a famous Croatian professor, who is now a member of academy of sciences and arts). We easily got along during the whole my work on both theses. A few weeks ago I visited him and finally found out the reason for our good agreement, which I have not known before. He took his HP45 from the drawer... Immediately, I found out that our way of thinking was that what was the same in the approach of both of us. So, this explained our whole good cooperation. When I told him that I collect them, I knew that he appreciated that (btw, he still uses his machine).
My wife supports my hobby, my son as well (they use their HP's 12C and 32SII almost everyday and are deeply satisfied with them). My friends here at this forum... there is not a need to add anything, except that it is always my pleasure to exchange information here and to know about new facts, approach, skills, etc. I DO NOT CARE ABOUT THE REST OF THE WORLD.
It is not E-bay prices that make my hobby appreciated for me. At least, I would never accept that a HP65 is more expensive out there than a HP67, or a HP25C than a HP33C, or a (famous) HP70 than e.g. HP37E, or anything than a HP41CV/CX-HP42S, or HP10 than anything else... Please, do not tell me about market economy, offer and demand laws either, etc, I just do not care. The better calc for me is the one with better functions and more elegant solutions implemented. I do not need an E-bay as a measure of value at all.
I admire the way they work and the extensive tests they have been subjected to. Remember, that the only known bugs in a HP67 are those in the instruction manual dealing with the small arguments of trigonometric functions. Could anybody tell me something about the known bugs in MS Excel functions (no matter what version)? About MS Windows bugs? The human kind would have never succeeded with a Space Shuttle project if they were using today's software those days (imagine only a message: "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" during landing, or a similar situation). If you can rely on your calculator I am sure you will land safe and sound...
The proofs for this are in famous article "Making -2 to 3 equals -8", by Dennis Harms, in HP Journal, or the famous key pressing devices for testing of Woodstocks, or many forgotten techniques hidden in engineering manuals of HP67 or HP41... Nowadays, this would have disappeared as a forgotten knowledge, if we did not have Dave Hicks and the rest of you guys and girls.
Once awhile ago I appreciated the excellence of HP products, nowadays I cannot say so for their today's products. Their products of ten or twenty years ago are still invaluable today and still deserve to be appreciated.
I AM PROUD OF MY HOBBY, no matter what others may say. They once will have to pay a ticket to see my collection of vintage HPcalc's, if I decide so. Nevertheless, I have met many people who supported my opinion, though they did not know about us around the moHP.
I cannot end this story without Muyo and Hasso (hope that db would like this one):
Muyo is driving his car along the highway (say E-1). He hears an announcement from his radio: "Dear drivers, the road conditions are fine, the weather is fine, everything is just fine, except that there is one fool driving along the E-1 in the wrong direction". Muyo says, "Ha-ha, she says one fool and I see hundreds of them".
Everything depends on the point of view... I do think that Muyo is right...
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