Re: The HP 35S has arrived...

[looking back into history, having collected enough truly fine calcs
for my tomb, for reliable navigation in the after-life :]

On Tue, 29 May 2007 03:25:03 -0500, Raymond Del Tondo wrote:

At least it looks very promising, modern retro style
with ENTER bar and arithmetic keys where they belong.

I suppose by "arithmetic keys where they belong,"
you mean one row lower down, rather than above ENTER ?

There was very good reason for the original HP35's
arithmetic key placement, however, which was on the
left, with [+] and [*] adjacent in the middle
of the grouping, but that has long been forgotten.

http://www.hpmuseum.org/four35s.jpg

Since those days, HP added its now-expected extra lower-left
shift keys and ON/C, moved arithmetic keys to the right side,
and adopted the same sequence of [+] [-] [*] [/]
that the "four-banger" industry made everyone expect
(the present-day item is also one column wider,
very beneficially).

My accountant friends, who "speed typed" on their old
adding machines, would have appreciated the thoughtful
"human engineering" considerations of industrial designer
Ed Liljenwall -- "We spent as much time on the keyboard layout,
on the choice of functions, and on the styling
as we did on the electronics" -- but usage has changed,
and so has design.

The following quotes are from hpmuseum.org:

"The HP-35 and probably the entire
HP pocket calculator product line
was the sole result of a visionary CEO
who chose to ignore the market studies
and produce what he felt that engineers would want.
His view of the market was that if the engineer at the next bench
liked it and thought it would make his job easier,
then it was worth doing. The HP-35 was developed in two years,
at a cost of approximately one million dollars with twenty engineers.
At the time, three to five years was a typical HP development cycle."

"HP originally developed the HP-35 for internal use
and then decided to try selling it."
[when has that ever happened in more modern times?]

"Hewlett-Packard Integrity...
The HP-35 had numerical algorithms that exceeded the precision
of most mainframe computers at the time. During development,
Dave Cochran, who was in charge of the algorithms,
tried to use a Burroughs B5500 to validate the results of the HP-35
but instead found too little precision in the former to continue.
IBM mainframes also didn't measure up. This forced time-consuming
manual comparisons of results to mathematical tables. A few bugs
got through this process. For example: 2.02 ln e^x resulted in 2
rather than 2.02. When the bug was discovered, HP had already sold
25,000 units which was a huge volume for the company. In a meeting,
Dave Packard asked what they were going to do about the units
already in the field and someone in the crowd said 'Don't tell?'
At this Packard's pencil snapped and he said: 'Who said that?
We're going to tell everyone, and offer them a replacement.
It would be better to never make a dime of profit
than to have a product out there with a problem.'"

Also not in more modern times.

"The HP-35, like all the hand-held HPs that followed,
was required to remain undamaged after falling three feet
onto concrete on each of its corners."

Yeah, that's the one I want in my casket,
to survive the final six-foot drop :)

Off[xx ]On
.