Is Sharp even in the running.

[Steve Simpkin]

(08-16-2023 06:52 AM)EdS2 Wrote:  That is an especially challenging numerical integration, and numerical integration is always going to be an imperfect art, because one can always find functions which misbehave with respect to any given tactic.

So a very good education will provide the student with some tactics to check their results.

The HP-15C manual contains a whole appendix on how to be careful with integration.

William Kahan was directly responsible for the integration function used in the HP-34C/HP-15C and most importantly, the section in the manual that dealt with the complexities of using it. HP originally did not want to include this section in it manuals.

KAHAN: That’s how the HP-34C was born. They agreed to do it, and then like a thunderclap, they were appalled when I said, “You know, we’re going to have to put some guidance into the manual because people who use these keys, especially the integrate key, they can fool themselves. These things cannot be foolproof. There will be situations where people will get misleading answers, and they need a little bit of guidance about that.” “Kahan, you just told us to do this stuff, and now you tell us that you’re going to get wrong answers! I mean, all this time, we’ve been listening to you tell us how to get the right answer, invariably, every time!” Well, the difficulty was then that I’d have to go to the manual writers. But there was a Hewlett-Packard policy which said, “We are professionals, and we sell to professionals. We tell them what the device does, and they figure out how to use it. We’re not writing tutorial material in our manuals.” And I tried to explain, “Look—this time you’ve got to put some tutorial material in the manuals. You really must. Otherwise, folks are going to fool themselves.”

Well, the managers wouldn’t do it, but I had persuaded Barkin, and I can’t remember the name of the other guy. It’s probably in there somewhere. There were two guys who were writing the manuals, and I persuaded them. I think persuasion is the wrong word. This was a case of subversion. I subverted them and got them to do something that their managers had told them not to do. The manual writers listened to my arguments and decided that I was right, and their managers were wrong. And that’s a dangerous decision, you know. You can get fired for that. They wrote the two extra chapters into the manual, which said something about the solve key and something about the integrate key, and a little bit to warn you. And I had written up some more stuff, which ultimately got into the Hewlett-Packard Journal. And the managers were outraged. They had said explicitly, “Don’t do that.” And now their guys had done it. And they said, “Take it out.” And they were told, remember, “If we take it out, it’ll delay the appearance to market.” You’ve heard that story before. That was it. The managers had just been blackmailed by time-to market, so they left it in. Then afterwards, they did a survey, and they discovered that the customers loved this stuff. In fact, the customers would often say they had bought the calculator because they’d been told that there was advice in the manual about these problems, which was advice they actually needed not only for the calculator but also when they solved similar problems on the big machines. And so when I came up with these articles, they were perfectly happy to print them in the Hewlett Packard Journal. I was told by the editors some years later that they had had more requests for reprints of these articles than for all their others put together.

Okay, so they put this, you might call it tutorial material, into the manual. I believe some of the manuals are now available online, and so you can look at it yourself. Well, of course, the particular writing staff manager was pissed, and the marketing people were, of course, annoyed about a violation of policy; when they interviewed customers, though, they had these little questionnaires—you buy something; they’ve got a questionnaire, you send it back. They would see that people actually liked that material and, in some cases, had bought the calculator because the material was there, so they felt confident as purchasers that they could use it. I think ultimately there was some award from the Willamette Valley Chapter of the Technical Writers’ Association that went to Barkin and company for writing what was considered an exceptionally good manual. That was the first of two occasions when I heard about an award for an HP manual. So there were guys who looked at me sidelong at HP, but there wasn’t any hostility. They figured I had done the right thing. The calculator was extremely successful, as such calculators go."

Dr. Kahan's full oral history PDF document can be found at:
William Kahan Oral History Aug 2005

The Aug 1980 edition of HP Journal that discuses the HP-34C and its Integration function (written by Dr. Kahan) is available at: https://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/pdfs/Is...980-08.pdf