Jake-S@cup.portal.com (Jake G Schwartz) (05/28/91)
With all the discussion over separating the calculators from the palmtop computers, I thought it would be worthwhile sharing a small amount of data from the "handhelds videotape" activity. To this point, I have made over 80 copies of the HP48 calculator conference from Chicago in June of '90, around 70 copies of Bill Wickes' HP48 talk from last November and over 40 copies of the HP48 users get together in Las Vegas from last January. With all that, only 16 copies have been made of Eric Vogel's HP95 talk from April 29th when he visited Philadelphia and spoke for over three hours on the machine. These 16 copies includes at least a half dozen for the locals who could not be present to hear Eric in person. Now, I know that there is already a 12-week backlog on the '95 and everybody is already sold out, including EduCalc who has something like a thousand customers waiting. So, what's wrong? I think that the c.s.h people just aren't turned on (in general) by a DOS PC handheld, in spite of the marvelous hardware magic that HP has done to get this package on the street. Perhaps if HP decided that the NEC V20H was their official successor to the Saturn processor, and they decided to do a VERTICAL format machine with that chip in it, we as a group would be much more interested. How about HP48 RPL in ROM and offering DOS/Lotus on a plug-in card and put it all in an HP48-like package, etc.? I think if Eric had come around to speak on such a machine, I'd have made at least thirty copies of his talk already. Maybe we'll have some clues by Corvallis conference time in August. Jake Schwartz