Valentin Albillo, a long-time writer of interesting or amusing notes on HP calculators, has recently rebuilt his own site collecting his papers and findings, and in this one he compares the very comparable near-contemporaries: the HP-41C which is an alphanumeric-capable programmable calculator, and the PC-1211 which is a handheld Basic computer. Know Thy Foe: A New Contender (pdf)
Some of his writings were previously not freely available on the web, so this should be good. I particularly like these:
HP Article VA004 - HP-12C Tried and Tricky Trigonometrics
HP Article VA005 - HP-12C Serendipitous Solver
HP Article VA006 - Long Live the HP-15C
as now available in his HP Articles collection.
We had this comparison in the classroom (without any foes)…
There was also a fairly popular Casio handheld (with rather short display lines, but two of them), but I forgot the model number.
There was also the one Electronika imitated ingenuously using a PDP-11 on-a-chip internally (typical Cold War overkill)…
Also, 1987 is far too late. ('82/83, I’d guess.)
Edit: Maybe the FX 740P (I think, this is also the model, Electronika copied externally. But this one has just a quite big status line. However, memory may me not serve that well on this particularity.) http://pocket.free.fr/html/casio/fx-740p_f.html
Edit to the edit: Now I do remember: it wasn’t really two display lines, but a typical gotcha. On first sight, you’d think, wow, two display lines (which was fairly uncommon then), but, on closer inspection, this wasn’t really the case and the single, real display line was rather short due to the big characters. (It was rather ironical that Casio eventually provided two real display lines with the updated model.)
