Penneys and came home with a new device that fundamentally changed how he worked – a simple ‘4-banger’ Texas Instruments calculator, probably the TI-2500 ‘Datamath’ model. One day in the mid-1970’s he went out to the local J.C. My father was (and still is!) a chemical engineer, and I remember watching him sit at the table after dinner grinding through stacks of engineering calculations with a slide rule and long calculation sheets. It’s hard for those who didn’t live through this time to understand just how big of an impact the handheld electronic calculator had on the scientific and engineering world, and this included the topographic sciences. All the data would then be sent to a USGS field office or headquarters where the specially trained ‘calculators’ would re-evaluate the data to provide a final approved result.Ībout 40 years ago there was a paradigm shift in the topographic field that was brought about by the introduction of (relatively) inexpensive handheld calculators. For example, in the US Geological Survey (USGS) the topographic or geodetic survey crews would collect the data in the field and do some initial accuracy checks just to make sure they hadn’t ‘busted’, or obviously exceeded the required accuracy for the type of survey the were conducting. There was a time not long ago that the accuracy of these calculations was so important that the job of ‘calculator’ was something that a young man or woman with good math skills could make a decent living at.
HP 41 RPN SCIENTIFIC CALCULATOR BATTERIES FULL
But just 60 years ago the same routine would take a competent topographer or mathematician hours to calculate by hand and would involve the use of special forms, books full of mathematical tables, slide rules and, if he or she was lucky, a hand cranked mechanical calculating machine that might be able to hold precision to a decimal place or two. A mouse click or two in a multi-threaded 64-bit desktop application launches a routine that returns a mathematical solution in seconds. Today all of the complex math involved in map making is easily and swiftly handled by computers. A competent topographer needed to be conversant in everything from plane geometry to matrix algebra to calculus. This means number crunching, lots and lots of number crunching. This all has to be figured out before the first line is drawn. Before those squiggly lines get drawn there first must be a determination of things like the geographic extent of the map, the scale, the coordinate system and projection and the precise location of key features on the map. Map making is far more than drawing squiggly lines on a sheet of paper. Maybe that’s why the response to an enthusiastic comment about HP calculators on an Internet discussion group was simply,”What are they?” Data can be entered into the new HP-35 using RPN or, for woosies, conventional algebraic methods.The topographic sciences are a math intensive endeavor.
HP 41 RPN SCIENTIFIC CALCULATOR BATTERIES SOFTWARE
calculator emulators are pervasive, and math analysis software offers even more functionality, eliminating the need for a handheld calculator altogether in many situations. Of course, whether the handheld calculator will follow its predecessor, the slide rule, into engineering-tool extinction is debatable: Spreadsheet applications and PDAs offer most of the basic calculator functions. It’s just so cool when someone from marketing asks to borrow your calculator at a meeting. The introduction of a new calculator is significant because a few years back speculation was rampant on the Internet that HP was about to exit the calculator business, causing many hard-core fans of Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) to fall into a deep depression. It served me well through engineering school.Īnd I kept on using it even after going to work at HP rival Texas Instruments-in spite of a persistent story (I was never sure whether the tale was apocryphal or not) about an engineering manager who so loathed HP products that when he caught a newly hired engineer using an HP, he would take it and smash it to smithereens. Least I date myself too terribly, let me point out that my first calculator was a later model (though admittedly not a whole lot later) - the Hewlett Packard 41C.
HP is introducing a retro model of its first hand-held scientific calculator, the HP-35, to mark the 35th anniversary of HP Labs and the calculator’s introduction. Well at least for those of us of a certain vintage. Today is a happy day for engineers everywhere.
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