About DM32

[J-F Garnier]

I'm reacting to a discussion started elsewhere, but since it's more about the history of the HP 32SII rather than the new DM32, I'm posting here:

rprosperi Wrote:

Aardwolf Wrote:Imho, if not a complex data type, at least just support the left-out functions the same way as now: it makes no sense that x^y is supported but e.g. x^2 is not.

It would totally not be feature creep to support it for inverse trig, hyperbolics and their inverses, sqrt, x^2, 10^x, log10(x), abs, etc..., if anything it feels more like feature creep to implement an error message for those instead of just returning x^2 if you already have x^y implemented, and have the user guess which ones are supported and which not (like, trig is supported but inverse trig not? why?)

The 32Sii was designed primarily for High School students, and although clearly usable for some college and even some working engineers, HP chose to not over-complicate the 32Sii's UI design by adding in 10-20 more functions; the keyboard and UI is already quite full. If a user needed such features, other models were available which offered richer feature sets like these.

(emphasis of mine)

Looking at the HP 32SII box of the time (1994), it's perfectly clear that HP was targetting technical professionals, with five times the word "engineering" on the box:





Indeed, the 32S and 32SII were my preferred tools at work, especially in the lab (I'm an EE).
The larger LCD was much more readable than the 42S, or the 48SX that I owned at the time too.

About the already "over-complicate the 32Sii's UI design", it was a deliberate choice of HP to introduce a 2nd shift key and a more complicate keyboard (relative to the 32S/42S), to increase the "perceived value".

Watch for instance the presentation by Eric Vogel: Reengineering the HP 32S, HHC 1991 who clearly explains it:
videos.hpcalc.org
with the same kind of discussion that we have 30 years later, between marketing (now SM) vs R&D (now, the 32SII users asking for more features

J-F