It says that it's not accepting new registrations; is there a reason to think they're lying about that point?

Based on the fact that the last new registration was 8 months ago, and there were only 9 registrations in the entire year, I'd assume that the forum is basically tango uniform.

TTFN
FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies

Just wondering: is it a portability thing or do you have some old HP28S programs that you wish to revive?  Is it just nostalgia (I still use a 120MHz laptop I got 14 years ago)?

I haven't seen any engineers use a graphing calculator for over 20 years.

One could imagine that it might be difficult getting one's laptop into a SCIF, but it might be possible to get a calculator approved for that.

These might have some useful information:
http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp28c.htm
http://www.hpmuseum.org/rpl.htm

TTFN
FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies

IRStuff,

No I do not think they are lying.  I did not see the message that said they are not accepting new registrations.

xwb,
Yes and yes, & no and more reasons.  Not nostalgia.  I also still use my hp 41cv and that is also not nostalgia.  The first battery in the 41 lasted 15 years -- maybe Bill and Dave were still alive then.  The second battery is going toward the second 15 years.

The more for 28S is:
1)  Built in financial program
2)  opens like a book with alpha keys on the left panel
3)  closed you can slip it in your back jeans pocket sit on it without damage -- very durable construction
4) Soft keys after programming for example gear and bearing calcs.  Very handy and efficient analysis along with portability
5) RPN works nice for me


I sold my first 28S to "upgrade" to an hp48 capable of  hard wire to desktop.  A friend spilled coffee on my 48 corrupting all of my saved programs and data and also made it non-functional.  That was about 12 years ago.  I prefer the 28 over the 48 so I recently acquired another 28S on-line.

IRStuff'
Thank you for the links.  I am reading through them.  Very interesting!

OK there is a bit of nostalgia going way back to about 1968 while setting up a magnetic permeability test bench for testing HyMu-80 Nickel based alloy sheets 0.0005" annealed for high permeability computer erase cores I had my first exposure to hp after purchasing an hp o-scope and millivolt meter.  Hp sent TWO engineers (one was probably an EIT) to help me learn how to use the 0-scope.  How often do you see that kind of support?

Hp has in recent years fallen into degraded quality.  Our off-site IT/ISP computer engineer advised me against  buying an hp laptop because he has a whole stack of them non-functional and no support.  Instead I purchased a Dell M4600 workstation laptop – my first laptop about a month ago.  It has graphic card capable to support SolidWorks 2012 which I needed.

Speaking of nostalgia.  For my senior project circa 1966 I researched metallizing of high Alumina Ceramics comparing  the Molly-Manganese process vs. vacuum sputtering Lithium-Molybdate.  Field trips included Western Gold and Platinum, Ratheon, and Litton Industries.  Litton showed me some of the very first printed circuits applied by sputtering.  These circuits were mucho macro. It was about a  one inch square ceramic substrate with all of the circuitry legibly discernible with the naked eye.

Last year I worked 4 months at Honeywell Electronics Specialty Material division where they make "Targets" sold to Intel, Sony, etc.  Honeywell supplies abut 25 different metals and alloys ranging from refractory metals through light metals to precious metals on these diffusion bonded targets with metal purities of 6-7 nines purity for discretely sputtering metal atoms onto computer chips.  Each target sells for $5,000-80,000.

Design for RELIABILITY, manufacturability, and maintainability

http://jacques-laporte.org/forum/register.php

Quote:

Info
This forum is not accepting new registrations.

TTFN
FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies

IRstuff,

Yep that is the one I missed.  Never even got to that page.

TTFN

Design for RELIABILITY, manufacturability, and maintainability

A side nore, For smart phones, you can get free emulators for both hp48 and hp42. Pretty handy imo since the phone is always within reach wherever you are.

=====================================
(2B)+(2B)' ?

True enough, but most of the emulations are essentially trying to clone the keyboard layout onto a surface that's less than half of the original keyboard, generally making the display absurdly small.

TTFN
FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies

Incredible number of HP calculator emulators on http://www.hpcalc.org/hp49/pc/emulators/ and http://www.hpmuseum.org/simulate/simulate.htm but it is nothing like the real thing.

Good point, the small appearance is something important to consider.

There will be some variability among phones, calculator, personal preference.

For phones, I have Samsung Infuse 4.5” diagonal screen, 800x400 pixels. iPhone has a lot of strengths like standardization and ease of use, but I think screen size is not an advantage (it is smaller at 3.5”).

For calculators, there are at least two completely free programmable HP RPN or RPL calculator emulators available on Android Market: HP48G (Droid48) and HP42s (Free42).

The Free42 is relatively uncluttered. It has 34 keys spread out over the bottom 3 / 4 of the screen has 34 keys (top1 / 4 of display shows bottom two registers). Each key has two labels – the normal one and the one describing the shifted meaning.

The Droid48 is much more cluttered, with. 44 keys packed into lower 2/3 of the display (top 1/3 displays bottom four levels of stack, soft key labels, status bar with useful info like current directory, etc). Each key has up to 4 labels (right-shift, left-shift, unshift, alpha, each label with different color)!

I’d have to admit that does make for a very cluttered appearance of the HP48G, particularly when you first look at it. Over time, it’s not so bad because you tend to memorize where the keys are. That makes it easier to look for the label you want because either you know exactly where the key you want is, or at least you are scanning only the particular color of the key you want which reduces the number of labels you’re looking at by factor of 4.

Also it should be mentioned that while the compactness gives a cluttered appearance, it does not make it hard to press the right key, because the key is a small key in center, several of the labels surround the key. So I don’t have any problems with hitting the wrong key due to size.

Another note to mention – there is a pc-based program HPEDIT which allows you to develop HP48 programs on your PC and transfer them to your calcualtor/phone (useful for larger programming projects imo). The programming environment has a text editor with multi-color coded highlighting depending on the word (reserved word, numeric value, string value comments etc). It also includes an emulator where you can send program easily to emulator directly from the editor to try it immediately. And you can enter programs directly on the emulator of course.

Both calculators are powerful and programmable. Comparison was made here:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.hp48/browse_thread/thread/bdf1d2f69a8640db#
There may be some preference involved. Personally I prefer the HP48G over HP42sby a longshot because the programming environment is more advanced like a pc, more features are offerred, and also I love the unit capabilities.

Since these two programs are free, I’d recommend just trying them out to anyone interested. There are also 5 or 6 more HP calculator emulators on Android market if you’re willing to pay a small price $1 to $5 (I haven’t found that necessary).

=====================================
(2B)+(2B)' ?

One correction: "HPEDIT" should've been "HPUserEdit"

=====================================
(2B)+(2B)' ?

Also, I understated the number of keys on the HP48: it's 49 keys (not 44 as I had said).

=====================================
(2B)+(2B)' ?