In his talk Reviving the Spirit of HP Calculators — Part I at the Stuttgart HP Conference 2024, Christophe de Dinechin offers a clear and insightful analysis of the current landscape of programmable and scientific calculators, with a particular focus on Hewlett-Packard products. He introduces his project to reinvent the best calculator in the world, specifically highlighting the HP-48SX for user experience, the HP-50G for system access, the HP Prime for graphics and keyboard functionality, and the newRPL for numerical precision and support. You can find more information here. I highly recommend spending an hour watching the video.

Key features of the DB48X are discussed, including its use of the Reverse Polish Lisp (RPL) interface, enhanced computational capabilities, customizable menus, and a user-friendly interface inspired by graphical user interface design principles. Del also addresses the challenges of implementing advanced features, such as supporting variable precision and improving handling complex numbers, matrices, and text input. The target hardware platform is the SwissMicros MD32 (here).

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