Re: OT--HP & TI in the 70s Message #2 Posted by Eric Smith on 4 May 2012, 10:11 p.m., in response to message #1 by Matt Agajanian
You're making the assumption that specific TI models were introduced in response to specific HP models, and vice versa. Except in rare instances, this almost certainly was not true.
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What TI models were released to compare to the 19C/29C and HP-67?
The TI-59 and PC-100A were introduced in May 1977, and were generally considered to compete with the HP-67 and HP-97. The HP-29C and HP-19C were introduced in July and September 1977, and perhaps one could consider the TI-58, without or with the PC-100A, to compete with them.
While HP and TI were in competition, that product development usually took a year or more, so both companies were constantly developing new and improved calculators. If one company introduced a new model in May 1977, and the other in September 1977, there is basically no chance that the latter product is an intentional, specific response to the former.
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But, why and how did TI think that the 58/59 system would far exceed the 41?
Who says that they did? The TI-58 and TI-59 were introduced in May 1977. They had more functionality than the HP-67, which had been introduced in July 1976, but they probably were not so much a response to the HP-67 as an obvious evolution of the SR-52.
The HP-41C wasn't introduced until more than two years later, in July 1979.
The more interesting question is why TI cancelled the TI-88, which would have been somewhat competitive with the HP-41C. Of course, even if they had shipped it, they would have been fairly late to the party, since they didn't even announce it until May 1982. That is clearly a demonstration of the long product development cycle; it is quite possible that they didn't anticipate that HP would introduce something anywhere near as sophisticated as the HP-41C in 1979.
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