Special Thanks to Valentin Albillo Message #14 Posted by BShoring on 10 July 2013, 6:03 p.m., in response to message #8 by Valentin Albillo
I can't say enough how much I enjoy all of your great articles!
Not only do they show an incredible array of possibilities with various HP calculators, but they also bring me back in time to the period when these fascinating machines were amazing and delighting people with undreamed of possibilities.
When the HP-35 came out, I was using a bulky Monroe mechanical calculator at work with a carriage that moved back and forth and bells that rang like a typewriter. It would be a number of years before I'd get an electronic one at work, so it's not hard for me to get into that spirit of wonder that you write about of what the early HP calcs could do. For those of us who never got our hands on an HP-35 or HP-25, we are fortunate we can use emulators. But even better to have someone like you to take us by the hand through complex calculatons and to show how, with the right technique and imagination, one could turn the HP-25 into a supercomputer! Or solve polynomials on the HP-12C! Or perform numerical analysis on the HP-35!
I seem to remember seeing some of your articles back in the PPC days, 3 decades ago. I wish I had known you or had seen some of your writings when I bought my first electronic calculator back in 1975. I walked into the Calculator Department of Macy's Department Store, just knowing that I needed something with a memory. There were lots of calculators. At the high end were the HP's and TI's, with functions I didn't even know how to use and with pricetags that intimitated me. I settled on a modest thing at a fraction of the cost, with percent, square root and recriprocal functions and still came away amazed at what it could do. Had I been enlightened, I could have invested in a proper RPN machine, but little did I know. Just having a machine that kept track of the decimal point was a big advance for me. For a month I didn't trust my new acquisition so I double checked all my calculations by hand with pencil and paper just to convince myself that it was accurate. If I had tried, and had known how to use an RPN machine, it would have blown my mind.
When you wrote about how you were pleasantly surprised when you got your HP-25 that it could do even more than you ever dreamed of, I know that feeling and had it with my first HP.
I don't think the visionaries at HP could have dreamed of the limits to which the user community would push their creations.
Thanks for enlightening me and also for the wonderful trips down memory lane!
Sincerely,
Bob in San Francisco
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