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Hewlett-Packard HP-49G

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No other company can claim to have produced the best calculator in the last four decades as many times as the Hewlett-Packard company.

In the 1960s, HP was among the first to produce high-end desktop calculators, and their models quickly became the machines of choice due to their quality, their design, their interconnectivity.

In the 1970s, HP produced the world's first pocket scientific calculator the HP-35 and the world's first programmable calculator (and a decent one at that, even by today's standards!) the HP-65.

The high-end calculator market of the 1980s was dominated by the HP-41C, the world's first alphanumeric calculator, and the first calculator that can rightfully be called a pocket mainframe due to its four expansion ports and the uncountable expansion devices that became available.

By the end of the decade, HP produced the world's first graphing calculator, and their flagship model, the HP-48GX, arguably remained the best graphing calculator even as the decade was coming to a close.

And just when it seemed that HP was finally ready to abandon a field that it has led so long, and allow the market to be dominated by cheap, throwaway devices primarily designed for educational use, not for ergonomic efficiency, they came out with yet another astounding machine: the HP-49G.

To be sure, the HP-49G is not perfect. Some of its shortcomings received heavy criticism from even the staunchest HP fans: rubber keys (rubber keys! on a Hewlett-Packard model!), the lack of an IR port, the lack of expansion slots, a display glass that allowed dust to get in underneath and suffered from discoloration, a buggy operating system, and last but not least, a substandard manual.

Some of these defects were corrected: the display glass is better on current production models, HP published a manual for advanced users, and as for the operating system, since the calculator is flash-upgradable, it is easy to download and install bug fixes. The other shortcomings are easily made up for by the calculator's amazing capabilities, including its built-in computer algebra system, its huge amount of memory, and last but not least, the RPL programming language, an advanced object-oriented language first introduced with the HP-28S that remains by far the best calculator programming language today.

I am still learning this calculator's capabilities, so for now, I am going to leave this page without a programming example.

Incidentally, if you want the definitive book on the HP-49G, forget about HP manuals. Buy Science and Engineering Mathematics with the HP 49 G by Gilberto E. Urroz instead, published by GreatUNpublished.com. Highly recommended, even for HP-48 users! Chapters from this book are also available at http://www.infoclearinghouse.com/.