#hewlett-packard

[wallpapers4screen]

[science70]

Hewlett-Packard HP 9800 Model 10 programmable calculator, 1972.

Correction: Thanks to @apexgrodd for helping to identify the device in the photo.

[diemethyltrips]

H632 General Purpose Digital Computer System (Honeywell Information Systems, Inc.) 1968

[krjpalmer]

PC Magazine June 24, 1997

on Google Books

[yodaprod]

HP-150 (1983)

[whattolearntoday]

A bit of January 1st history...

177 - Commodus, son of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, becomes consul for 1st time at 15 years old - then youngest ever in Roman history

630 - Prophet Muhammed sets out with his army towards Mecca, capturing it bloddlessly

1724 - Daniel Farenheit proposes a system for making thermometers and the Farenheit temperature scale

1818 - Mary Shelly’s “Frankenstein” is published anonymously (pictured)

1862 - 1st US income tax - 3% of incomes >$600, and 5% greater then $10,000

1863 - Emancipation Proclamation issued by Lincoln to free slaves in US confederate states

1892 - Ellis Island opens as a US immigration inspection station - would go on to be the gateway to the US for more than 12 million people

1896 - German physicist Wilhelm Rontgen announces discovery of x-rays

1939 - Hewlett-Packard founded in Palo Alto, CA “the birthplace of Silicon Valley”

1979 - US and China (People’s Republic) begin diplomatic relations

2018 - Initiative of 300 Hollywood women called “Time’s Up” announced to fight sexual harassment

[taperwolf]

Calculators! I still love graphing calculators. They're kind of pointless at this point, when everyone has a large-screen supercomputer at all times, but even so.

Like a lot of people in the early'90s, I used school-supplied TI-82 and TI-83 calculators in high school math classes, but when I hit college the first time, my calculus class required the HP48g, which was, for the time, very powerful, and is still a thing of beauty; I upgraded several times over the next decades, with the above right being the HP50g I still have. The Hewlett-Packard graphing calculators used reverse-polish notation, which I still prefer. To digress for a moment, your standard calculator, to add two numbers, requires the following keystrokes:

2 + 2 =

But with RPN, you do:

2 ⏎ 2 +

Pushing "Enter" puts the first number on the stack, where it lives until an operand like + needs it. This is closer to how computers actually do arithmetic in the hardware, and us olds got to like it. Anyway.

Both the TI and the HP calculators were programmable, but they took quite different approaches. TI implemented an array of versions of BASIC for each model, while HP used an oddity they called RPL: Reverse-Polish Lisp. RPL was, imo, more expressive and powerful. (In either, you could drop back to a machine language for the specific processor.)

But programming fashion has moved on; I don't know what the standard TI calculators use these days, but I saw one (and a copy from Casio for much cheaper!) in the local Target that appears to have fully embraced modern programming:

Yup, the TI84 Plus CE Python: programed in the language where whitespace is syntactic. Not sure how hard it is to put in tabs on a calculator keypad.

Oh, but if you want to write Python on that that Casio fx-9750GIII but don't like black, you're in luck!

[etraytin]

Quarantine: Inauguration Day

January 20 Well, the end of my daily journaling was a little precipitous, I'll admit, but it was a combination of suddenly getting busy, having a lot of trouble with the new computer, and most of my busy stuff not being particularly interesting. However, today is a historic day, so I feel like I really ought to say something about it. I am still as lazy as ever, though, so I'm not going to bother counting how many days I missed. I was able to watch the Inauguration on TV for the first time in my adult memory, because the Xbox plays YouTube and the Biden Inauguration Committee had a dedicated stream with two of the Capitol tour guides excitingly narrating before and after the ceremony. It was actually pretty cute, because they were so eager to tell everybody about all the art and history, as well as crowing about the special camera angles that nobody else got to use, like of the doors to the Senate chambers. The last inauguration I watched was in 2012 because I had no desire to rub salt in my own wounds, but it looked very different this year, sparse and with an empty mall full of flags where a cheering crowd ought to be. We only live a few hours from DC, and I wonder if, were it not for COVID, we'd have gone to see it. I would love to watch the Inauguration of a good president, but it's been kind of scary this past week and nobody was sure if there was going to be something bad happening. I let the kiddo take an hour off school this morning so he could watch with me, which he was very pleased about. I explained the special historic significance of Kamala Harris, because he is very excited about seeing historic events. I also told him that this was not the first inauguration we watched together, but that he was barely three for the last one and probably doesn't remember. He got a little bored at points, but tbh so did I, and he didn't have the offsetting relief of getting to feel bored about politics. "This is something I have seen before, this is nothing new" is suddenly enormously reassuring after having a president for whom norms were not a thing. Also the poet was very good and Lady Gaga didn't butcher the national anthem and nobody, you know, went crazy and tried to overrun the Capitol again, so it was a very good inauguration and I liked it. Would've been nice if Justice Sotomayor could've done a few more practice runs on the pronunciation of "Kamala," but it's still legal. After the inauguration I decided it was time to get some tech support for my computer. We have been back in VA for about a week now and the new computer's problems are becoming more acute. It was freezing once every few days, now it can do it a couple of times in a day. And freezing is annoying, but these are unrecoverable freezes, where you can't open the Task Manager and kill the problem, but you just have to power down and back up, and lose whatever you didn't save. It sucks. Anyway, long story short, it turned into a three hour tech support chat wherein I wiped all the programs off the new computer and it did not fix the problem. I am very disappointed, but more tech support will have to wait until tomorrow. The computer is only like three weeks old! I should've known that fifteen years was not long enough for HP to get off its bullshit. Because that took so long, I was only able to do one of the shops I lined up for today. I haven't been mystery shopping in months, but the end of month incentives are super good this month and I will take 30 bucks to spend half an hour in a grocery store any day of the week, especially a high-end one that is actually clean. I got the other one rescheduled for tomorrow at least, so I'm not in trouble. Husband cooked dinner while I was gone because he is awesome. He's back to teaching and has also gotten his editorial comments back for the first chapter of his book, in which he has been encouraged to expand on the topic of his subject's freak accidental testicle injury. I guess that probably does stand out somewhat in academic writing! I've been picking at the edges of the house, cleaning a little bit at a time, but I need to buckle down and actually do some useful stuff. I've been in the frantic energy stage where I can devote any amount of time and attention to anything so long as it is not at all useful. Hopefully now that the inauguration has happened, things will settle down some and I'll be able to concentrate on stuff again. Knock on wood!