rsteele@XN.LL.MIT.EDU (Rob Steele) (03/13/90)
Thank you HP-48SX reviewers! I knew this would be the place to get n * 02/100 dollars worth of poop once the thing came out. Thanks also to HP for allowing these guys to serve us this way. Shrewd of them. Now for my contribution. I love HP calculators for the same reasons as everyone else--power, quality and etc. But having begun to take these for granted, what I really care about is the user interface. I've got an 11C, 41CV, 28C, and 42S in addition to my new 48SX and I'm afraid that the 11, in spite of its primitive technology, has the most coherent and well engineered user interface of the bunch. The 11 is the simplest calculator in the collection and the least powerfull which maybe gives it an unfair advantage for this kind of comparison. The more complex the machine, the more complex the user interface has to be, right? I hope not. Isn't the engineer's job to make technology accessible and to hide complexity? And the programming language--Reverse Polish Lisp my foot. It's just fancy Forth. And it's not object-oriented either; it just has a fancy stack. Maybe the next generation will carry enough memory to support a real Lisp. Well now, that feels better. I wouldn't carry on like this if I didn't really care. Rob Steele MIT Lincoln Laboratory They didn't hire me for my opinions.