Most common calculators in the forum?

[Thomas Okken]

(12-01-2017 01:22 PM)pier4r Wrote:  Thanks to the results so far yesterday I read a bit more about the 41 searching the reasons for the comment of Thomas Okken. Why was the 41 the end of the competition in the high end calculator market. I read that it was the first hp (I am not sure if it was the first in the world) that could let users write labels in programs, and indeed it was deemed as a portable computer with flexible functions.

In order to appreciate just how much better the 41 was compared to everything else at the time, compare it to the top models it took on, the HP-67 and the TI-59.

In a nutshell: the 41 combined the benefits of the HP "merged keystrokes" programming, and the TI model where function arguments were usually on a line by themselves. The HP approach was much nicer to use, but the TI model worked better once the number of labels and registers got large -- and boy did the TI-59 have lots of those!

In the HP-41C, they used a TI-like storage format under the hood, while still showing one complete instruction per line on the screen. Best of both worlds, very nice.

And they added an alphanumeric LCD display. I think that was a first, and it made programming even nicer, and it made it possible to write user-friendly programs, that could ask for input and label their output. And you could redefine every key on the keyboard. And they finally provided an amount of memory that was actually competitive with the high-end TIs, and could be expanded way more. And it had four expansion ports, each of which could be used for RAM, ROM, or external hardware. And all of these things were firsts in a handheld calculator.

It was so much better than anything else, so revolutionary, it was almost shocking. I imagine TI engineers sighing in dismay when they realized that HP was shipping a product that was better even than what they, TI, only had on the drawing board.