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As much as I loved my HP-15 an HP-41, I think you have a rosy recollection of that time. Back then, HP calculators were seen as expensive and pretty much reser
by hota_mazi 10y ago
As much as I loved my HP-15 an HP-41, I think you have a rosy recollection of that time.
Back then, HP calculators were seen as expensive and pretty much reserved to wealthy people. Regular people stuck to TI. And for that reasons, HP calculators were rarely seen in classrooms.
And when they were seen, nobody knew how to use them (I was often asked to lend mine and when they saw it was an HP, they said "oh you have one of these weird ones,never mind").
- throwaway7645 10y agoMost of what I know comes from listening to other engineers (my father's age) talk as I went through engineering school with a TI Voyage 200. That didn't have a nice manual, but it had pretty printing and could solve large systems of complex equations with ease and was almost too powerful and even came with apps (essentially a TI-89 with more RAM and a lot more buttons). I could type out a massive equation and then adjust it slightly each time. My father was dirt poor and worked in fast food full time while taking classes, and he could somehow afford one as did most of his classmates as the RPN feature would be invaluable when a TI calculator would force you to write down output from individual calculations without an X-Y-T stack (please correct me if I'm wrong though). Another advantage to owning one was some introductory programming classes would allow you to use the HP language for homework assignments. As ridiculous as this sounds, the alternative was waiting in a massive line at the computer lab to use the Unix time-sharing system (apparently the university had one of these) to run your Fortran or Pascal code.