Re: A little brother for the WP 34s? Any need for that? Message #4 Posted by Gerry Schultz on 15 July 2011, 7:08 p.m., in response to message #3 by George Bailey (Bedford Falls)
George, I agree with you that the 34s' keyboard layout is busy and intimidating. Many of the functions I don't understand and would probably never use but I wouldn't change it one bit! HP hasn't made a new scientific calculator since the 50G. They have produced financial calculators as that's where they make the most money. I think having Marcus, Pauli and Walter (the Gang of Three) donate their free time, step up, design and write a scientific calculator using HP's hardware is a great blessing to the whole community. I also thank both Cryille and Tim of HP with the foresight to build the 20b and 30b with field re-flashing and making an SDK available. The time and energy the Gang of Three have put into this project is staggering to me. I barely have any time to play with the 34s.
Anyway, I'm getting off my main point. With no new HP Scientific calculators on the horizon, the Gang of Three designed an all encompassing scientific calculator to satisfy most people's engineering needs; with limited flash memory and a limited LCD display. So, even though I don't understand most of the functions on this calculator, it forces me to expand my world to make use of this new tool. Or else I'll just ignore them and use what I know. One of the things that I like is that the 34s has the functions of the 16c built in so that forces me to go read the 16c manual and have a calculator to see how that works.
Given the time and energy to get the 34s to this point, will the Gang of Three want to build a lite version of the firmware? I would think they will want to finish this project first, take a month off in the south of France, and then look at the possibility of doing a lite version of the 34s. Of course, then the debate of how many different lite versions are needed, how will the functions be split up into which lite version, debugging and adding new features to fill out the subset calculator... I'd say expect these in 2015 to 2020. Oh, and lets start an escrow account so the Gang of Three can be paid since they will be working for the community and to help them justify all the time away from their family. I'm sorry that I sound sarcastic. If these guys are willing, I will try and help in my own small way.
Thank you to the whole community. See you in September in San Diego,
Gerry
Edited: 15 July 2011, 7:35 p.m.
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