HP calculators live on, small thanks to HP

The first pocket-sized scientific calculator in the world was the HP-35, invented by Hewlett Packard and introduced to the world in 1972. HP literally created the market for handheld scientific calculators. Although many worthy competitors arose, none could match HP's quality, reliability and overall superior design. HP was king of the mountain until Carly Fiorina chose to pull the plug on the calculator division sometime in the 1990s, and ceded the entire market to Texas Instruments.

Carly's excuse at the time was that "calculators are not profitable," which was an outright lie. We won't get into that here. That's water under the bridge. The geniuses who invented such dominant creatures as the HP-12C (the financial calculator that refuses to die), the HP-41 series and the HP-48 series, have moved on to other careers. So has Carly. Around HP, some people still spit after they say her name.

HP calculators have a vast and loyal fan base around the world. Some of those fans were later hired by HP to revive the calculator division, but it was too little, too late, and HP has never reclaimed the market. Like I said, that's a topic for another time, and besides, whining about it won't bring back the glory days.

One of the wisest things HP did, after announcing the dissolution of their calculator division, was release their ROMs into the wild. You can find ROM images, and maybe even source code, for many of HP's calculators online. I believe you can even find source code and emulators for the Saturn and other 4-bit CPUs at the heart of the calculators. (No, I won't include links. Go sniffing for them if you want them.)

Thanks to this wise and generous move by some key players inside HP (see the note at the end), their calculators live on. You can now have an HP calculator app on your iOS or Android device. These emulators work as well as the real things, including support for external storage and printers (on some apps).

My (free) recommendations for iOS: i48 (left) and Graphix48 (right).


My (free) recommendations for Android: Droid48 (left) came first. Droid48sx (right) is a beautiful follow-on product.


go48g is a really sweet alternative to Droid48. And if you're an HP-41 fan, go41c is a beautiful (and free!) HP-41 emulator.


On iOS, youcan also buy i41cx, an HP-41CX emulator.


Once you've made the leap from free calculators to ones you actually spend money on, your whole world opens up. You can get expandable versions of the HP48 and HP41 series. You can get the HP-12c and all of its sideways brethren. And you can get my personal favorite, possibly the best overall scientific calculator HP ever made, the HP-42S. What? You've never heard of the 42S? Well, that's another story for another time.

Here's an open-source version of the HP-42S emulator! It doesn't use a single bit of HP's ROM images; it merely duplicates the functionality. (Merely.) For iOS (left) and Android (right).


A note about those "key players": The HPers who released all of this code into the wild were not the movers and shakers at the top, who nearly drove this once-great company into the ground. They were a tiny number of HP engineers and engineering managers with a combination of passion, integrity and vision that is seldom seen inside HP anymore.

Things we don't do with a telephone or television anymore

With the advance of technology, there are some things we no longer do with our telephones or televisions, although we still use the words. For example:

"Pick up the phone" - It used to be that you answered a telephone call by picking up the handset while the phone was ringing. Or you initiated a phone call by lifting the phone off its hook or out of the cradle. Now you have to press a button to answer the phone or dial a number.

"Hang up the phone" - Most phones today, even cellphones, have a "hang up" button. But you no longer terminate the call and disconnect the line by hanging the handset on the hook on the wall.

"Dial a number" - Numeric touchpads have been de rigueur for over 40 years. I can't recall the last time I saw a dial telephone that still worked. Children and many young adults today don't even know how to use a dial phone.

"The phone is ringing" - Telephones today beep, chirp, warble, and blink. They can also sing you your favorite song or make burping or screaming noises to alert you to a call. But if you want a true ringing telephone, you'll have to download an, um, "ringtone" that sounds like a ringing telephone.

"Turn the TV on/off/up/down" - It used to be that every television had a rotary knob, labeled "ON/VOL" or "OFF/VOL". This knob was a combination on/off switch and volume control, and you had to turn the knob to perform any of the named actions. Other electronic gadgets also had rotary on/off switches, and so "turn me on" became a part of the vernacular. Today, rotary switches are a retro fashion, and they often don't have the same mechanical contacts behind them as the old ones.

"Tune in a channel" - The channel selector used to be a rotary dial with stops at channels 2 through 13. Don't ask about the 1. You wouldn't understand. But even if you turned the dial to, say, 5, channel 5 wouldn't come in clearly until you turned the fine-tuning dial to "tune in" the station. "Automatic fine tuning" was a fancy feature on new TVs in the 1970s, but it still didn't work perfectly. Today, you punch a channel number on the remote, and the TV's electronics take care of the fine-tuning for you. In fact, with digital TV, fine-tuning is a thing of the past.

What I said about TVs also applies to radios.

Feeling sorry for myself: what might have been

A recent tickle from a former colleague on LinkedIn dredged up something from my distant past and sent me on a short tailspin into the Land of What Might Have Been. I'm going to feel sorry for myself, then go to bed and sleep it off. In the morning I'll go to my new job, where I am happy and content and working hard.

This former colleague "endorsed" me for a skill on LinkedIn. She hasn't seen me for about 15 years, so the endorsement doesn't mean much. So I ignored it. Then I fell into my tailspin.

In the late 1990s, I was an extremely competent engineer in my department at Hewlett-Packard. In fact, one year I was the top-rated engineer out of a peer group of about 80 engineers. I was sought after for my technical expertise, my problem-solving skills, and my communication skills. Engineers and non-engineers from other departments came to consult with me.

Our department had three engineering groups. One of the engineering group managers got a promotion, leaving his position vacant. My manager suggested I apply for the position. So did his manager.

I hadn't even considered such a move. I was happy being an engineer. But people had told me over the years that I would make a good manager, and many people had even said, "I would work for you if you were a manager." So I did some research, mainly sounding it out with other engineers and managers, even on the production/operations side, all people whose opinion I valued and trusted. I got unequivocal encouragement from all of them, including votes of confidence from all of the managers, and more "I would work for you" responses from my peers.

The managers' opinions were important to me, because some of them would be on the interview team.

So I applied for the job. I prepped for the interviews. And I did a great job in the interviews. And they gave the job to someone else - one of my fellow engineers was promoted.

Well, she turned out not to be a very good manager. In fact, seeing some of what she did as a manager, I wondered how she had ever gotten the job. I ended up sitting in meetings and on committees with her as the years went by, and - really, this is not  sour grapes - she just wasn't very good at management or leadership.

Then HP and Agilent split. We endured wave after wave of layoffs. I never saw any managers get laid off, or any executives. You would think that the Powers That Be would do the math and figure out that they could save more money by firing one incompetent executive than by laying off ten innocent production workers. Or five hard-working engineers. F#$&ing idiots.

Here's the sorry-for-myself "What Might Have Been" part:

Ten years after leaving Agilent, I am still an engineer, but I am making $10,000 a year less than I was back then, and after ten years of struggle, my personal and family financial situation is precarious.

If I had gotten that promotion, I would now be high up in the management ranks at HP or Agilent. I would be a highly respected manager and leader. I would be making $150,000 a year - or more. We would still be living in that big brick house. And my wife would still have the luxury of being a stay-at-home mom, with all the benefits that go with that. My daughters would not have had to scrimp on their weddings. My musical daughter could have gone to Ithaca College instead of the University of Northern Colorado. We would be living free of debt or other financial worries. And we could be using our time and our wealth to help our children and other people, something we have always wanted to do. Instead, we struggle.

That other engineer that got the job? She has changed employers. At least twice. She has changed careers. She has changed husbands. She has changed her last name. She has even changed her first name. And  she has changed her appearance so drastically that I don't even recognize her photo on LinkedIn. And she has parlayed that promotion into a Chief Technology Officer position in another state. I don't really know her anymore.

Throwing money around "like sewer covers"?

A lot of people don't like Walmart. One of the main reasons is that it's become too big for its oversized britches. Many cities, particularly in the Eastern U.S., are resisting Walmart's attempts to expand buy building in the cities.

Boston mayor Thomas Menino is one of those who don't like Walmart very much. In fact, he dislikes them so much that when Walmart offered to donate to a summer-jobs program in the city, Menino refused their offer. He accused Walmart of trying to buy their way into the city. Said he: "Walmart should settle some of the  social issues they have to deal with first before they come to our city and throw money around like sewer covers."

Really, Mr. Mayor? Is that what people do in Boston? Throw sewer covers - er, manhole covers - around?

Another good "Out of Office" message.

Here's another good "out of office" message.

I’ll be characterizing the performance (simulated vs. actual) of laminated composite low-friction materials against a low-temperature crystalline dihydrogen oxide matrix on Friday the 28^th.  I expect to spend 7 to 8 hours performing a complicated series of temperature / altitude / insolation shmoos.  Back on Monday.

The location is Colorado. The date, in case you missed it, is February 28. The intended audience is 12 engineers. Two of them understood the message. Do you?

Pie

When I was very young, my mother brought out two different kinds of pie for dessert. There was only enough pie for each person in the family to have one piece. But both flavors looked so delicious, that I couldn't choose.

So when she asked me which one I wanted, I said, with all the innocent honesty of a young child, "Both."

She said, "Then you don't get any."

And she meant it.

How many times in our lives are we given a choice between A and B, and told that we can only have one of them? And how many times in our lives does our indecision leave us with neither one?

It was a harsh lesson to learn, at that young age, and the inhibitions that it built into me have burdened me all of my life.

When my kids were young, we brought out two different kinds of pie for dessert. Just like when I was a child, there was only enough pie for each person in the family to have one piece. One of my children looked longingly at both of them, silent tears forming in her eyes.

I said, "Why don't we give you half a piece of each? Somebody else can take the other halves."

And I meant it.

My children learned a different lesson from the one I learned. Not all of them learned that lesson, but the ones that did have gone on in life to sample and enjoy choices A and B, and also C, D and E. Their lives are richer because nobody put artificial limits on their freedom to choose during their formative years.

My greatest impact

Question from a job interview: "Thinking back on your career, what's the one thing you've done that has had the greatest impact?"

Answer:
Well, I can't think of one. I'll have to give you three.

First, back in the 1980s, I did something that everybody said couldn't be done. I figured out how to gold-plate the inside of a copper tube. This tube was about 30 centimeters long and had an inside diameter of 7 millimeters. It had to be gold-plated on the inside, to a very exacting specification. I figured out a way to do it that was twice as exact as the specification. That might not seem like much, but these perfectly plated tubes were used to calibrate microwave test equipment, which was in turn used to calibrate and tune the radars in military helicopters and fighter jets. Our two biggest customers were Hughes Aircraft and the U.S. Marines. So, in summary, this is a story like "The House That Jack Built:" I invented a way to gold-plate the tubes, that calibrated the testers, that tested the radars, that went in the aircraft, that were flown by the Marines, that won the Cold War.

Second, I was one of the first 200 employees of Hewlett-Packard's Inkjet Components Operation. We made the printer cartridges that kicked off the inkjet revolution. My job was to turn the nozzle-plate manufacturing operation from a low volume R&D operation to a high volume, high quality, production operation. From 200 employees, our cartridge volume expanded to fill seven factories on three continents. If you open the HP printer on your desk and pull out the printhead cartridge and look at the business end of it, you will see a little gold square, smaller than a postage stamp, with hundreds of tiny holes where the ink comes shooting out. That little gold square is my baby. My work appears in every HP inkjet printer in the world.

But my greatest impact didn't come from my work as an engineer. It came from my work as a teacher. For two years, I taught 7th grade mathematics, and I had an impact on 200 young lives. Some of them came into my classroom hating or fearing mathematics, and unsure of their abilities. Almost every one of them left with an advanced understanding of math, and with increased self-confidence. I didn't just teach mathematics, I taught about math and reading and music and life skills and believing in yourself. Many of my students still keep in touch with me, and it's fun for me to see what they're becoming and what they're doing with their lives. Some of them will change the world, and I will take my share of credit for that. That is my greatest impact.

Note for my seminary students: I didn't mention you in the interview. But for the record, I was an early-morning seminary teacher for 12 years, off and on, over a period of 30 years. I taught the Gospel of Jesus Christ, through the scriptures, to hundreds of high-school students over those years, for an hour every morning before school started. But it wasn't just book learning. I taught you how to search for and find spiritual truth on your own, how to recognize it, how to test it, and how to apply it in your lives. The spiritual foundation that you young people built for yourselves in my classes has sustained you through the years, kept you morally strong, and guided you through your life experiences as individuals and in your own families. Many of the things that I taught you have been passed down to your own children. That is an impact equal to, or greater than, the impact I had on my mathematics students.

Note for my children and my adopted children: Forget "impact." You are the greatest things I ever did in my life. I didn't mention you in the interview either. I didn't need to.