HP and the Surveying industry

[Han]

(10-22-2015 02:32 AM)RMollov Wrote:  

(10-21-2015 03:10 PM)Jake Schwartz Wrote:  It is interesting that at the time this article was written, the HP49g was already 5 years old and the 49g+ was one year old. And yet I couldn't find any reference to the fact that HP had not given up on graphing calculators...this article seems to imply that the 48 was the end of high-end calc development at HP. And only the following year, Tim Wessman would demonstrate (at the HHC2005 conference in Chicago) the sophisticated surveying equipment based on the 49G+ that he and John Evers had developed.

Jake

Actually I share the spirit of the article. As a (back then) practising surveyor I never took seriously HP49 and its family after. Even today HP48 is the calculator of choice used by most surveyors I know.

BTW all those Sokkisha electronic field books are long since forgotten unlike the great HP48 which is sought after and regarded as a treasure if found.

Regards,

For surveyors, the HP49 was a step back with respect to surveying. The lack of expansion cards of any sort meant that all that data had to fit in the built-in memory, and then be transferred over by wire. Moreover, any software written for the HP49 could not be protected in the same sense that proprietary software was "protected" on the HP48 series in the form of a ROM card.

When the HP49G+ came out, the SD card slot was a great feature, but the keyboard pretty much rendered the HP49G+ quite useless. Not to mention the non-standard RS232 port that a lot of surveying devices from an older generation still needed. By the time the HP50G came out, there had already been far too many years in between and the surveying industry had moved on.