Have you ever found any high tech gadgets last more than 25 years (1/4 of a century) on the market & still produced and supported by manufacturers. It is indeed very hard to find one with average product cycle around 3 years in Silicon Valley. Believe it or not, I did find one that meet the honor. It is HP-12C Calculator. I purchased one in 1983 which I still use these days. I was in Walgreen last week, a drug store around the corner, looking for BeneFiber. I passed by one aisle and see the familiar HP-12C calculator, priced at $69. Although there is a platinum model that cost more, the original one is still there. This is a finance calculator for interest, mortgage, amortization, etc. I heard that some big financial company bought this calculator for each employee & used for company's work. This may be the reason why it is still around these days. But why they pick HP-12C? I think the reasons is the pocket size, easy to use & its long-lasting batteries. As far as I can remember, I only changed batteries once in 25 years. HP-12C is truly a classic product in itself, amazing.
Related to calculator, it is the number---unit of number, the way we do the counting. In most calculators, the number is displayed three digits in a group with comma. In other words, it is easy to read it in thousand, million, billion etc. But this creates problems for 万& 億. I am sure most of us have the same experience. When someone said 700 billion dollars to bail out the financial mess. What, 700 B, oh, it is 七千億. It takes about 4 or 6 seconds to get the conversion. How about 八拾七萬? Oh, it is 870 thousand. This time it takes about 4 sec to get the conversion. How about 四万万七千万? Oh, it is the same as 四億七千万, and it is 470 million. It takes more than 10 sec to do the conversion. I found it rather amusing whenever Chinese people in America try to quote the big number & everybody sort of sucks into some confusion. The inconsistency comes from the way Chinese count---4 zeros a group instead of 3 zeros a group. 百, 千, 万(4 zeros) then 億(8 zeros), 兆(12 zeros). But the western way is thousand (3 zeros), million (6 zeros), billion (9 zeros) then trillion (12 zeros). I think it will be a good idea that Chinese create two new units of number: ＃米 and ＃比. They are equivalent to million & billion. We might as well get used to these two numbers and save us a lot of trouble. So 470 million is just 470 ＃米 & 700 billion is just 700 ＃比. And 140 thousand can just be 140千, simple as it is. So from now on, we all live in peace & happily ever after.
PS1: You may be upset that why we have to confirm to the western way of counting. Well, it started long time ago when our ancesters wanted 西学為用. This does not mean that we abandon the counting of 万& 億, we simply add two more units of number to facilitate easy counting & communication. Take a look at Periodic Table, Uranium (鈾), Plutonium (鈽), Americium (鋂), Curium (鋸), Einsteinium (鑀), Fermiun (鐨), Mendelevium (鍆), Lawrencium (鐒), Berkelium (鉑), Californium (鉲) etc. So we already named a lot of items per western words and pronunciation. By the way, the United States fares very well in the periodic table: Americium, Californium, Berkelium. Berkeley & California are the only university & state to be named in the periodic table. Also Lawrence (Lawrencium, atomic #103) & Seaborg (Seaborgium, atomic #106) are the scientists from Berkeley.
PS2: It is funny to see Trillion & 兆 all end up with 12 zeros. The reason is simple: 12 is divisible by both 3 & 4. No wonder ancient Babylonian used 12 進位 instead of 10. 12 has factor 2,3,4 & 6. But 10 has only 2 & 5 factors. At least for division, 12 based # is twice efficient as 10 based #.
