15C vs. 11C Message #4 Posted by Karl Schneider on 18 Dec 2002, 12:42 a.m., in response to message #3 by Glen Kilpatrick
Welllll...
As fate would have it, today I was comparing a co-worker's personal 1986 11C with a company-provided 15C used by another co-worker. (My employer provided 15C, 42S, 16C, and 32Sii units to the engineers in the '80s and early '90s.)
I have two 15C's, but no 11C, and I would not buy one unless I found a bargain.
While the seller (Larry) seems honest and upstanding, Joe did make several valid points, and I could add several more:
1. The item *was* overpriced at $135 with no manual.
2. Larry *did* omit the "no manual" fact in the re-listing (although lack of a manual is evident in the picture).
3. Larry claims, dubiously, in the first listing that 15C's go for $100 more that 11C's. (I see complete 15C packages for $150-200 if not MIB; I won a $137 15C package with Advanced Solutions Handbook but a cosmetically flawed unit. Might 11C's might be even more due to rarity?)
3. Larry is a lawyer, not an engineer, so he might be excused for several of the statements made in the listings:
"like 15C" in the title (See discussion below.)
"all functions of 15C except integration, imaginary numbers and matrices, which you probably don't want to do with this one line display handheld anyway." (Not quite right; the 11C also lacks SOLVE and has only 203 bytes RAM vs. 448 for the 15C. Furthermore, matrix and complex-number support is *very* useful in science and engineering; that's why HP introduced them in 1982 to the 15C when not even the flagship 41C/CV had them. SOLVE and Integrate were available on only the fine-but-obsolescent 34C, and are also very useful if one does not have a PC with Matlab handy. How many even had a PC in 1982?)
"The 11C is the Engineer's favorite." (Consensus in MoHPC seems to be that the 15C, 42S, and 41CX are the favorites, and I couldn't agree more.)
Some personal anecdotes: I bought the 15C as a collegian in November 1983 fter comparing it side-by-side with a new, unsold 34C. I liked the conventional looks of the 34C, but saw that the 15C was the better product. Back in college again in 1991, we EE students were asked to solve a 3-loop AC ladder-network circuit on a test. I saw that the 15C was fully equipped to tackle the problem. The 11C was not -- it lacked sufficient memory, functions for linear algebra, and complex numbers. I'm really not sure how the other students got through that problem...
An excellent article about the development of the 15C is found in the May 1983 Hewlett-Packard Journal, scanned on Volume 4 of the MoHPC CD-ROM set. The 15C was a brilliant advancement of the 11C, with its built-in high-level functionality having an ease of use that even a much-costlier 41C with Advantage Pac ensemble couldn't match.
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