Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!swrinde!sdd.hp.com!hp-pcd!hpcvra.cv.hp.com!rnews!hpcvbbs!akcs.egarcia
From: akcs.egarcia@hpcvbbs.UUCP (Edwin Garcia)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.handhelds
Subject: Re: Re: HP-32S II Curiosity
Keywords: fractions,bug,HP-32
Message-ID: <28181481:2620.6comp.sys.handhelds;1@hpcvbbs.UUCP>
Date: 26 Apr 91 12:40:09 GMT
References: <51123@apple.Apple.COM> <281794a9:2620.5comp.sys.handhelds;1@hpcvbb
Lines: 85

Joe, you seem to be a strongly opinionated person, based on the acerbic
tone of your messages here.  However, you must remember that people's
opinions vary; what may seem to be an "exciting" feature to one may
seem rather trivial to another.  Of course, there are different ways of
expressing one's opinion.  One can choose to be calm and reasonable and
polite, or one can be emotional and zealous and attempt to humiliate or
denigrate an opposing point of view by using such devices as capitalized
words, one-line quotes as though they corroborate one's point of view,
quotes from canaries being chased by inept felines, and yes--even quotes
from a robot which, you do remember, later realized that its logic was
so defective that it had to "eliminate" itself by committing suicide,
etc. etc.
 
Having said that, I think we need to clear up a few things here; most of
the people on hpcvbbs--myself included--would readily agree that we
enjoy using HP products.  I like HP's handhelds that I even collect
some of their old models (you've probably seen my message to Dan Allen
@apple.com regarding HP-35's).  But does our love of HP mean we need
to share the same "excitement threshhold" for each improvement that
HP makes in its handhelds?  I think not...  You are obviously very
excited about HP's implementation of the fraction mode on its newer
models.  I am happy you are excited about their *implementation*.
I believe you made an innocent mistake in misconstruing the content
of my original message as being a lack of excitement for their
*implementation* as opposed to being a lack of excitement for
*innovation*.  My message was intended to show that HP did not
innovate the idea of manipulating fractions on handhelds, yet for
some reason you took it as a criticism of their *implementation*.
 
You mentioned that HP is the calculator that has no equal and if
something is worth doing, it's worth overdoing, etc.  Oh come come,
we are all aware that even HP has its share of problems sometimes.
Do you remember the Series 30 (Series E) HP handhelds?  The quality
of assembly was so bad and the reports of burned out LED displays
and malfunctioning keyboards--and yes, some units even had missing
chips on the circuit board--were so numerous that even the engineers
at Texas Instruments were in stitches laughing at the apparent
downturn in HP reliability.  For every good feature you'll find a
bad one; one example is speed of plotting on the 28S and the 48SX.
To this day both units are slower in plotting a graph than a Casio.
Does that mean Casio's better all of a sudden?  For the moment,
Casio has the edge only in plot speed, HP has the edge somewhere
else, etc.  Tradeoffs, we must live with these annoying tradeoffs.
And you mentioned that the decimal point key on the 32S-II serves
two functions as though this were some grand innovation.  Well if
you really want to take an extreme example of this, do you remember
the Sinclair calculators that were released by Sir Clive Sinclair?
To save keyboard space they even stuck five functions on the same
key (three of the functions depended on how often you pressed the
key); the first time you pressed the key it would give you a decimal
point, the second time you pressed it would activate the exponent
display, and the third press would change the sign of the exponent.
Hoo boy!  Now that was handy, packing that all into one key.  It
seemed like a good idea at the time until some people started
accidentally hitting the key twice when they only needed a decimal
point, which forced the user to hit it two more times to get rid
of the exponent display and change sign operator (to this day I
thank the gods of calculator design that HP engineers decided to
place these three functions on three separate keys, rather than
adopting Sir Clive's unique idea...)  So this idea of having one
key acting differently depending on how many times it was pressed
was hardly a Hewlett-Packard invention.  But, getting back to
the discussion of tradeoffs, sometimes there are even tradeoffs in
designing new versions of the same calculator.  For instance, on
the 32S I had to wind through a seemingly endless array of menus
to get to some commonly used functions.  Example, on the 11C it
only took two keystrokes to get the standard deviation, however it
takes four keystrokes on the 32S.  But you see, even the folks at
HP realize when they make these bumbling tradeoff errors (the
"improved" HP 32S-II now takes only 3 keystrokes to get the standard
deviation which is a step in the right direction, but oh, how I long
for the good old days).  You know, there is something to be said about
the current predilection for over-menuizing and over-functionizing
our handheld calculators these days.  The design of HP's calculators
is becoming more and more baroque; in other words they are adding
so many functions that the user never feels he has true command of
the machine.  If I had to make an analogy I would say that the
situation resembles the difference between the Ada programming
language (a large, unwieldy computer programming language chock
full of features) versus small, simple, compact languages like
Pascal and C, which give you the basic *tools* you need to get
going, without overburdening you with things you don't need.  I once
read a message on a bbs somewhere that said a woman who saw the
48SX for the first time remarked upon seeing the monstruous plethora
of function legends above each key, "Gawd, what a geeky-looking
calculator!"  There is much wisdom in the intuition of an ingenue...