HP35s Loose Ends Message #1 Posted by MikeO on 19 Aug 2008, 12:03 a.m.
I did a little research of the forum archives to catch up on other observations of this little beast.
Did the uninterruptable program "feature" ever get worked out?
My HP35s serial number is 80700096. I note the lockup problems were reported with serial numbers 72100nnn. Looks like there was an effort to ferret out the problem, but I didn't find any posts reporting a resolution - or a way to reproduce.
I'm a little nonplussed about some of the programming features. Some are nice additions to the KSL programming paradigm, such as equation evaluation, but then I run into some really strange limitations, like not being able to name my programs with anything but a single letter, and not having any user defined function keys available! I'm sure this is a good calculator, but it's strangely less capable, in many ways, than the HP41 - a model nearly 30 years older.
I like the fact that I can absorb most of the details of this calculator in one day and use it to do some heavy lifting and write non-trivial programs fairly quickly. Overall, nice, but I think I'll end up classifying this tool the way I do my HP16C: a good, quick use, tool for knocking out rote calculations, but not a programming platform - there's just too many ways to lose programs with this model (no memory backup), and you really can't put that many programs on it at the same time anyway.
Could this calculator have been better? Probably. I'm sure it was tested quite a bit, but somehow it feels like it may have been rushed out the door a little prematurely. Still, I find I'm liking it quite a bit, even if there are a few loose ends left to work on.
MikeO
Edited: 19 Aug 2008, 1:40 a.m.
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