andrew@orca.UUCP (Andrew Klossner) (07/13/83)
"Several years ago, Hewlett-Packard made a calculator with a
built-in stopwatch, and another calculator that was the same
except for the stopwatch. Naturally the latter calculator was
cheaper. However, by pressing an undocumented combination of
buttons on the latter calculator, you could put it in the
stopwatch mode that it wasn't supposed to have!"
If the other "artificially different product" anecdotes are as
apocryphal as this one, then there is a lot of misinformation on the
net this month.
The two calculators in question were the HP-45 and the HP-55. The
HP-55 appeared many months (years?) after the HP-45, and differed from
it in that it had an accurate clock and was *programmable*. The HP-45
does in fact have a timer which is not accurate (mine runs at 91% of
real time). For a while there was a company which offered to install a
crystal to make the clock accurate, but I didn't respond.
The difference in price between these two calculators is more than
adequately explained by the programmability feature. Incidentally, the
HP-55 was a real loser; people don't seem to want clocks on their
calculators. Programmability buyers went instead for the HP-65, which
allowed the user to save programs on magnetic cards (and originally
listed for $800 !!)
HP-45 owners who haven't discovered the pseudo-clock feature (after all
these years) can learn the details by sending mail to:
-- Andrew Klossner (decvax!teklabs!tekecs!andrew) [UUCP]
(andrew.tektronix@rand-relay) [ARPA]phr@allegra.UUCP (07/14/83)
In one of the issues of Hewlett-Packard Digest (maybe not the right name; an HP house rag advertising their calculators), HP said that the HP-45 used ROMs four times as dense as the ones found in the HP-35. So after they'd cloned all the HP-35 code and put in the -45's extra stuff, they still had a couple pages of memory left, and the famous HP-45 timer was added strictly for hack value.