[HPCC-Conf] calculators for fun and prophet

[Richard Schwartz]

What you missed tonight was the jam session: Gary Friedman, Roger Hill, and
me.

As you know, the essence of PPC is finding features in the instrument that
are not supported by the manufacturer.   So I showed Gary a few sounds he
did not know his Xaphoon could make, heh heh....   One of them about two
octaves BELOW the normal bottom note.

Roger was interested in the spreadsheet on blues harmonica modes.  I had to
show Richard Nelson how black music (blues) is played all on the black keys
of the piano.  Then I showed him how the white race is impure: redneck
country music uses the MAJOR pentatonic scale, and is also played entirely
on the black keys.

Nobody was impressed by HP.  Time will tell.  It seems that when HP first
got into calculators, they had 1000 people working on them.   Now they have
10.   I don't think that is enough.

I don't see HP calculators in retail stores any more.  But HP is committed
to the idea of teaching students RPN at an early age so that they will be
loyal to HP.   Why RPN?   It is better than Lisp (Lots of Idiotic Stupid
Parentheses) in the same way that the Slovak language is better than
Bengali.   (different is not necessarily better or worse)

. . . Richard