curdstown

It had pretty good hardware I would say for the tradeoffs involved. One thing you should remember is that 30 years ago, the current semiconductor processes meant that if you put a faster/more capable CPU or color display tech in it, it would not last very long on batteries. The HP48 had phenomenal battery life on 4 AAA. A hand held gaming system like a game gear or Atari Lynx would last only a few hours on 6 AAs.

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?