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curdstown | 3 years ago

The French HP48 phenomenon was always interesting to me. How did that happen? I'm in the US and we had a French high school student visit over the summer. Always talking about the HP48SX, though he didn't bring it with him. But when I needed to get a graphing calculator I ended up buying an HP48GX instead of the recommended TI-83 (I ended up getting one of those as well). I used the 48GX throughout middle school and high school w/Meta kernel, Erable - the developers of which all French, ended up working for HP ACO. Used a 50G later on. It was always interesting to me how the development powerhouse for the HP48 series was all French, but never really understood how that happened. Was there some schooling mandate similar to TI in the US?

discuss

stephc_int13|3 years ago

It was a hacking scene with a few talented guys with strong enough personalities to organize meetups and write fanzines articles.

Also, the model was popular in preparatory schools because of the expansion slots, it was possible to extend the memory by a huge margin.

This memory was useful to store, well everything you could, and at the time those calcs were not forbidden during exams.

Some people (including me) even wrote text editors and viewers with support to display a mix of text and picture for schematics, physics or chemical diagrams...

The US scene was also extremely helpful, with people such as JK Horn or Eric Rechlin.

nicolas_t|3 years ago

Most schools recommended TI instead of HP (at least in the late 90s). The few people I knew who also had an HP48 or HP49 tended to be enthusiasts and all ended up studying CS at an Engineering school.

netmonk|3 years ago

I have the strong feeling that hp28/hp48 have a deep impact in IT industry given the number of smart and passionated peoples who self taught themselves low level programming before 18yo with them.

Im 43 it guy and started playing with hp at 12, my own first « computer » with countless hours: playing, coding, debugging, reading txt files. Naturally when I bought my first intel computer at 19yo I installed freebsd, to later go to openbsd and Linux.

And the first thing I do on my android phone is to install hp48 emulator.