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Calculator blog


Musings and comments about our common interest

 

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A comparison between HP 17bII, HP 17bII+ gold and HP 17bII+ silver

I wanted to check how the new designs fare when compared with the old Pioneer series. Here you have my impressions:

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Key feel:

The original HP 17bII wins, hands down. Second, and not too far from it, the HP 17bII+ silver. The slanted keys of the latter are more comfortable to put the finger on, but the rounded keys of the original model are not too bad. (In the current line, I still prefer the ARM 12c but not by much)

The gold HP 17bII+ is a very distant third. There is a plastic, hollow feel to the keys that is not so agreeable as with the rest. However, there is still a healthy keystroke feedback.

I have lost a couple of keystrokes with the gold model. Not enough experience with the silver. Never with the original one.

Of course, for those of us for whom the double sized ENTER key is fundamental, the gold is again in the last position.



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The rounded lower edges of the newer silver model make it more comfortable to handle it with a single hand. The fingers can better reach farther keys. The original's more square body makes it a little bit uncomfortable, but the thinness helps - while the gold is awkward to handle.

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Screen

Here the ranking is: 1st silver, 2nd gold, distant 3rd the original one.

The contrast in the original is in another (lower) league.

It is worth noticing that the screen in the newer ones has provision for trigonometric modes (GRAD) and the upwards and downwards triangles - it is HP 42s- ready!!!

Functionality

I started to use this calculator around 1990, when I betrayed the engineering profession and started an MBA. It was my work calculator for the best part of 10 years, so I am quite familiar with it. At the moment, and coming from the scientific line, the fact that there were many f-keys left empty made one feel that it was an inferior product. But then we realised that the solver tool was very powerful, and that with a little ingenuity you could program most anything you needed.

This is still the case with the new models, but seemingly in the latter models some functions have been left out compared with the original (the Let and Get ones). In any case, these functions were not referenced in any manuals that I know, and were discovered by using HP 19bII programming in the 17BII.

The new models include an additional menu for currency conversion. I have 2 units of the old model (one bought in Europe and the other in America), and one has the currency exchange menu (the European one) while the other does not. However, even the European one does not handle the Euro - they could not predict it at the time!

Having the 19BII+ with RPN, it was understandable at the time to handicap the 17BII with respect to the upper model, by taking out the trigonometrics and other functions; however, now the HP 17BII is THE upper model in the range - a little effort could have been done to complete the function range of the HP 17BII with the rest of the functionality of the 19BII.

(The latter was an excellent calculator - seeing three lines of the stack was a great help to plan you calculations, but the ugly and uncomfortable layout made it difficult to be used in real life. The reliability of the battery door made it a nightmare as well - most of my friends got theirs broken, and fixed with electrical tape.)

The memory is 8 kb in the first model, 32 kb in the newer ones.

Speed

We put the following function in the solver:

A=SIGMA(I:1:5000:1:1)

HP 17bII original: 81 seconds

HP 17bII+ gold: 78 seconds

HP 17bII silver:172 seconds

The 17bII original was based on the Saturn processor, while the silver is based on the 8502 processor. It is amazing that an architecture designed in the early 80 can compete with a current production processor - until you realize that the 8502 was used...in the Commodore 128 !!!.

There is nothing new under the sun...until the ARM based machines came in!!

A final comment: For utilisation in the real world, any of them beats any other calculator in the line up. The menu logic is better than the 30b (despite its extended functionality and programmability.And you can do a lot of things more than the 12c/cp (while the latter portability makes it better for the jacket pocket)

If you can at all afford it, even after so many years, this is still the one to have!!

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My HP calculator history (I)

First, some story: My first HP calculator was a HP33c in 1980 - when I was 14 and all my class companions were using 4-bangers (those that had a calculator). It was a pleasure to start learning programming: telling a machine what you want it to do...with all of 49 programming steps! You were reaching the limit all the time.

At the same time, I had access to a HP85 computer. Now I see it called a "calculator", but at that time it was considered the very top of professional computing. Apple ][ were considered toys compared with it. It had a decent BASIC language, provision for extended number precision (exponents up to +-499), could run from its ROM without the need of loading an operating system, and it had an integrated mass storage system (256 kbytes magnetic tape) and thermal printer for output. Best of all, it had HP-IB and with it a world of interfacing. In the application we were using it, we were printing invoices with a dot-matrix printer, drawing with an hp 7225A plotter and storing data on floppy discs. Later it came a 5 Mbyte winchester disk ("how on earth are we going to fill it up!"). To add the cream on top, its capacities could be expanded with additional ROMs (up to 6) that could be plugged on a card on the back of the computer.

The manual is absolutely the best computer or calculator manual I have ever seen. Never, ever, HP has approached that level of perfection. It went through all concepts and programming techiques with full details and lots of relevant examples. You can see examples of that manual at www.series80.org. It would be an excellent primer for programming for your children.

The keyboard feels a little primitive compared with today's examples, and the machine is clocked at around 650 kHz (meaning kHz, NOT MHz or GHz !!). The basic is interpreted and quite slow. Please remember that this machine is a couple of years older than the first IBM PC. But it was an excellent general purpose machine, best suited to engineering and industry. I have a warm spot in my heart for it since I made my first money writing programs for it.

Nowadays I have an HP85 sample that works flawlessly -except for a clear area in the printhead. The tape machine has been exchanged for a QIC one, with newe tapes, and all the ribbons of the printer have as well been exchanged. The fact that it continues to run after 30 years attests to the quality of HP of yore.

Coming back to calculators...

The HP33c calculator accompanied me up to 3rd term in Engineering - that is, 20-21 years old. Then I moved to a BASIC Casio for the rest of University. This allowed me to do some complex mathematical programming. The BASIC alternative would have been the 71b -but at several times the price of the Casio - but I always was longing for a HP 41c

3 years after I joined an MBA program in Barcelona, and bought an HP19bII. I felt I was betraying the engineering profession by buying a non-programmable, non scientific calculator. I should not have felt that way: it is a fantastic calculator and the solver allows for quite interesting programming. At the time, the alarms and time functions made it quite similar to a personal organizer. The main problem with it was the "real estate" it used on your working table. It was stolen from me, and then I replaced it with an HP 17bII - the original model. I missed the 3 lines display - but it was good enough. I still have that calculator. We were in 1994.

Fast forward to 2006 - after a number of years in finance positions, I enter a general management position, where sin and cos and logs are used, and I am no more money-starved. Then I decided to buy the best there is...the HP 41c - or so I thought...

I bought an HP 41cx, but it appeared that I had passed by a number of exciting calculators for over 15 years: the hp 42s (a 41c+ with an even better form factor) and the hp48 world...I just had to explore it. In a couple of years, I built the collection I now have.

My current preferred calculators are the hp15c and the hp 50g

I use the 50g in my daily work. I can write programs in RPNish RPL (RPL using only the RPN techniques) and the solvers. I use as well the matrix capabilities to manage budgets and company forecasts. I am in business long before my companions have entered the passwords in their Wintel laptops.

I "wear" the 15c in my jacket. It has the right size and format to help me working in the airplane or the high speed train. I have programmed it to add it most of the features of the 12c: date calculations, IRR, NPV, weighted averages, time value of money, etc. It actually is faster to use in most simple applications than the 50g - except when the solver is required. However, programs are extremely slow - when I calculate an IRR, 2 minutes are typical for a 10-year calculation. I guess that I'll have to wait for the hp15c+ (hp15c firmware in a new hp12c hardware)

I could wear the 42s - that I also have. I have developed as well the financial programs that make it similar to the HP17bII - but the solver is not the same as the latter, or the hp 50g for that matter. I prefer the 15c or the 50g - depending on the application.

In a later post, I will discuss in depth these three calculators.
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