IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - Cover3
RESOURCES
From times
oF Yore
The HP 35s scientific
calculator, suggested retail
price of US $60, is available
in stores and online at http://
www.hp.com.
and others rely on software
versions. I myself have a
few scientific calculators loaded onto my
PalmPilot. But would any engineer go out
and buy an HP 35s for the sake of its large
grab bag of features? I doubt it. Maybe
that's why HP is also plucking the heartstrings of nostalgia.
Nowadays, the real market for handheld scientific calculators is in education, from middle school through college.
The gadgets are commodity items sold
in college bookstores, discount department stores, and office-supply centers.
My own university bookstore has a rack
filled with them. In its present display
the HP 35s would occupy the high end
of the Hewlett-Packard section, at a
price of $59.99. Still, that is only about
half as much as the top-of-the-line
models from Texas Instruments, which
are even more bloated with features.
However, many middle school and high
school teachers require students to buy
graphics calculators, which would rule
out the HP 35s.
Nevertheless, the HP 35s is a highly competent product with capabilities that would
have been unimaginable 35 years ago, and
the price is right. I can't wait to see what
Microsoft will do for the 35th anniversary
of Microsoft Windows.
n
BuT who needs all these features?
Like other high-end scientific calculators,
the HP 35s suffers from a bad case of feature creep. That comes from the irresistible urge of designers to stuff in ever more
features as a product evolves, pushed by
the need to stay ahead of the competition
or to entice users to "upgrade" to new versions. This proliferation of features can
introduce unexpected failure modes. In at
least one HP "all in one" printer/scanner/
fax machine, for example, the user cannot scan a page if the printer cartridge
has run dry.
Feature creep can also lead to overly
complex but unimaginative products-and
the HP 35s is a case in point. How many
users would need to integrate an equation
on a handheld calculator? Or know whether
the true result of a calculation is slightly
above or slightly below the value indicated
on the display when the calculator is set to
display fractions instead of decimal numbers? Or need to choose between RPN and
algebraic-entry systems, with their very
different approaches to doing calculations?
Perhaps very advanced users might benefit from these functions, but I suspect that AbOut thE AuthOr
they would have abandoned the calculator KENNEth r. FOStEr, an IEEE Fellow, is a
for a computer long before they reached professor in the department of bioengineerthat point.
ing at the university of pennsylvania, in
Even my old Pickett slide rule suffered philadelphia. his e-mail address is kfoster@
from feature creep. It had 34 scales, only seas.upenn.edu.
a few of which I ever bothered to learn
to use.
tO prObE FurthEr
Granted, many engineers keep a hand- See the virtual hp calculator museum at
held calculator around for occasional use, http://www.hpmuseum.org.
www.spectrum.ieee.org
hEwlEtt-pACKArd
locations, 42 built-in physical constants, unit conversions, and lots of
other goodies. The user can choose
between Reverse Polish Notation
(RPN), an efficient way to manage calculations that HP has
long favored, or algebraic
entry logic, used by nearly
all the other calculators.
In a clever twist, a
user ca n enter a n
equation and solve
it numerically for
any of its variables
without rearrangi ng t he equ at ion.
However, the calculator
lacks some features often found in
high-end calculators, such as graphics
and symbolic math capabilities, removable storage, and the ability to interface
with other computers.
http://http://
http://www.hp.com
http://www.hpmuseum.org
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum October, 2007
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - Cover1
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - Cover2
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 1
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 2
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 3
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 4
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 5
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 6
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 7
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 8
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 9
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 10
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 11
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 12
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 13
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 14
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 15
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 16
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 17
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 18
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 19
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 20
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 21
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 22
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 23
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 24
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 25
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 26
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 27
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 28
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 29
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 30
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 31
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 32
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 33
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 34
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 35
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 36
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 37
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 38
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 39
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 40
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 41
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 42
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 43
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 44
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 45
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 46
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 47
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 48
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 49
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 50
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - Cover3
IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - Cover4
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