I envied a friend in a EE program and the University of Cincinnati. He had the first HP-35 I’d ever seen the year it was introduced (1972), but it was way out of my budget as a new freshman studying Engineering.
A couple of months after my friend acquired the HP-35, to my fascination he received a letter from HP detailing a list of obscure calculations the device performed in error (the tangent of 98.2352…, etc.) . The letter went on to describe that these were determined and then verified by computer simulation of the computational algorithms used internally - a concept new to this budding engineer. And, if he returned the calculator, it would be repaired and corrected. And to think we basically flew to the moon on a slide rule? Who could ever imagine a computer that could fit into one room? (Paraphrasing a line from early in the Apollo 13 movie.) Who carried around a CRC book of tables of various calculations in lieu of an unaffordable scientific calculator? Or programming FORTRAN on punch cards? Or PDP-8 on paper tape after toggling in the boot loader through the front panel switches? We’ve come a long way! I love the reminiscences… Steve aa8af > > I scraped and saved my summertime active duty pay to buy a Bomar 901 > four-function calculator in 1972 for $150, about $950 today. Hewlett-Packard > had introduced their milestone HP-35 scientific calculator that year for > $400, about $2535 today. Extremely few students could afford that. > ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html Message delivered to arch...@mail-archive.com
