【hp】(Mostly) Hewlett-Packard Calculators

Jake Schwartz has an excellent and up to date set of links to HP and related calculator pages.
HPCC, the Handheld and Portable Computer Club in the UK.
Eric Smith's HP Calculator Page
The Museum of HP Calculators, which has pictures of all the HP calcs.
Hewlett-Packard's very own (HP 48) calculator page Jeff Thieleke's HP Calculator Page, which includes The HP Art Gallery and the HP48FAQ.
An interesting calculator with a mechanical self-opening lid.
A marmoset whose wooden flanks clatter noisily in a medium gale. random plots

Intuition from Practical Computing

• General-purpose computers and general-purposes programming languages can be built.
• Different programs for doing all sorts of different things can be set up.
• Any given program can be implemented in many ways.
• Programs can behave in complicated and seemingly random ways—particularly when they are not working properly.
• Debugging a program can be difficult.
• It is often difficult to foresee what a program can do by reading its code.
• The lower the level of representation of the code for a program the more computationally expensive.
• It is possible for people to create large programs—at least in pieces.
• It is almost always possible to optimize a program more, but the optimized version may be more difficult to understand.
• Shorter programs are sometimes more efficient, but optimizations often require many cases to be treated separately, making programs longer.
• If programs are patched too much, the typically stop working at all.

A couple of articles I wrote about handheld computers (PDAs)

The future of handheld computing (1991)

That Would Be Cool! (1995)

www.peak.org/~jeremy/calculators

Random entries from The Computer Contradictionary by Stan Kelly-Bootle 1995 [0-262-61112-0]":

aibohphobia: The fear of palindromes.

ailihphilia: The love of palindromes.

ambiguity: That which resists disambiguation.

computer science:

1. A study akin to numerology and astrology, but lacking the precision of the former and the success of the latter.
2. The protracted value analysis of algorithms.
3. The costly enumeration of the obvious.
4. The boring art of coping with a large number of trivialities.
5. Tautology harnessed in the service of Man at the speed of light.
6. The Post-Turing decline in formal systems theory. “Science is to computer science as hydrodynamics is to plumbing” (Prof. M. Thump).

diagnostic: A person who doubts the existence of two gods.

heuristics:

1. The art of looking busy when seated at a terminal.
2. An upmarket problem-solving methodology still seeking a worthy class of problems.
3. A formal approach to idle speculation.

hirsute: Humorously endowed with a pleonasm of plethoric profundity, i.e., hair.

implementation: The fruitless struggle by the talented and underpaid to fulfill promises made by the rich and ignorant.

sufficiently large: As in “2 + 2 = 5, for sufficiently large values of 2.”

sillygisms: