I never did like the HP48, I still have my HP-41CX and use it all of the time. Back in the days before PC's I wrote a lot of programs for the HP-41, and still remember many of the commands, although the memory is starting to fade a bit.
I played around with a HP48 a few times, but didn't find ANY reason to get one. The HP41CX did (and does) everything I want from a "calculator."
:d
I had a tape drive, printer, a 300 baud modem, and an HP-IL card in my desktop. I used the HP-41 as an early data collector. We ran a 130 mile second order level line that was bluebooked using the HP-41 as the data collector, and stored the data as binary. The crew uploaded it each day using the modem, and I then converted it in the office and formatted it for submittal to NGS. That was before digital levels. I printed out all of my programs using the printer, but now the old thermal paper is pretty much unreadable.
My boss at the time (1972) tried an HP35 but sent it back. As he stated: "they sure screwed up by not putting an equals key on that thing". He then bought a Casio desktop FX1 that had sine, cosine and tangent keys - at least we could do away with the book of tables! It seems like we used that book to look up values to like 9 decimal places! RPL wasn't his thing but I, a youngster at the time, was amazed by it. I bought an HP35 a few months after that. Later an HP25 that was programmable, then on to several HP41 units, of which I'm down to only one new one left. And right now a there's a 48GX on my office desk and at home, an HP50g I received from John Evers ... its loaded with all the survey functionally (except data collection) that he put into a data collector program he was developing 15 years ago.
HP calculators for surveying...those were the days!
I think I bought this (at the time, to me, the best invention in the Universe) in 1971. No more trig tables! Needs battery pack.
How many of y'all remember using trig tables, and what we did with them?????ÿ ?????ÿ
What is the difference with the HP48 & HP48?
There were several different versions of the HP48
The main difference was the number of card slots in the calculator
The HP48GX had two, one for a program card and one for saving data files for different projects.
I was going to say "I'll see your HP-41s and HP-48s and raise you an HP-34C that will be 40 years old this coming December." But @flga kind of beat me to it with his great HP-35. Anyway, here's a video I shot this evening of my HP-34C running a program, using its built-in numerical integration function, to compute a Bessel function of the first kind of order 2, for an argument of 6.5. The HP-34C was the first calculator to have numerical integration and root finding built-in, and it had a lot of other functions for an inexpensive calculator (compared to other HP calculators). It had so many functions on the keyboard that it was one of the few HP calculators to have *three* shift keys: f, g, and h. Of course, the red LED display that goes nuts while a program is running is wonderfully retro.
After having coveted HP-35, HP-65, and HP-67 calculators for 8 years since the introduction of the HP-35, I was able to buy an HP-34C in the fall of 1980 while I was an undergraduate. That first one failed within a few months, the only professional HP product I've ever had fail (I'm not talking about the later consumer HP PCs and cheap printers). So the HP-34C I have to this day, shown in the video, is the warranty replacement that came in early 1981. The beginning of the serial number is 2051S, which according to the scheme used for all HP products at that time, means it was manufactured during the 51st week of 1980 (1960 + 20), in Singapore (S = Singapore, A = USA, etc).
The original NiCd battery pack long ago gave up the ghost, so several years ago I bought two after-market packs, in order to fire up this calculator once a year or so for nostalgia's sake.
This little, nearly 40-year-old machine took 3 minutes 42 seconds to compute that Bessel function (I cut the video down to 45 seconds). By the choice of display setting, I told the calculator that the integrand was accurate to only the nearest 0.0001. In actuality, the integrand function is exact (within the precision of the calculator), but the more precise you say the integrand is, the longer the calculator will spend computing the integral. At the end of the video, you see the result and the upper bound for the uncertainty of the result (the integration function returns both, in the x and y stack registers, respectively). I momentarily display the full mantissa of both.
The calculator got the result correct to 6 significant digits, giving -0.30743030... compared to the true -0.30743039...
I've realized that in the program, I forgot to scale the computed upper bound of the uncertainty by the same factor of 1/pi that multiplies the result of the integral, so the shown 0.00015708... in the video should really be 0.000050000... which is still far bigger than the difference between the calculator's result for the Bessel function and the true value.
I meant an HP42 & HP48. Someone needs to take me out of the typing pool.
@john-putnam The two main differences are the the HP-42S was a traditional RPN calculator with keystroke programming, with no expansion or I/O capability (other than IR printing), and the HP-48 series offered the RPL LISP-like programming (that was introduced with the HP-28 series) with an "infinite" stack and had card slots and wired, serial I/O.
I have an HP-50, not used a lot.
I have two HP48's, one TDS and one SMI card.
I have a HP41GX, had to fix it, is stored away and
still works, it was a gift.
I have a HP15c really used a lot.
I had an HP11c (stolen)
I have a newer HP35
and a newer HP33
I guess I should have purchased some HP stock but never did. 🙂 ?ÿ
I am still in deep with HP15 and a handful of 41s.
the best part is the iPhone i41cx+ app. I still write stuff for it. The HP15 iPhone app by HP is a front line app when my original is out of reach.
Q: does anyone recall a COGO app for 41 called KO?
Many a field crew, laid out many a project and was hook line and sinker to that full featured cogo program. Particularly since ray-outs for everything was hard copy from the office. It saved my ass on test day. (1991).
I have KO running on i41CX and it??s wonderful. (Available to those familiar with KO)
I??m curious if anybody else had used that program.?ÿ
And I had 2 41s with battery terminal corrosion. There are replacement parts for that since it was a killer to 1/2 of all 41s.
I have repaired those 41s. Still the best that ever was.?ÿ
