Most schools recommended TI instead of HP (at least in the late 90s). The few people I knew who also had an HP48 or HP49 tended to be enthusiasts and all ended up studying CS at an Engineering school.
I have the strong feeling that hp28/hp48 have a deep impact in IT industry given the number of smart and passionated peoples who self taught themselves low level programming before 18yo with them.
Im 43 it guy and started playing with hp at 12, my own first « computer » with countless hours: playing, coding, debugging, reading txt files. Naturally when I bought my first intel computer at 19yo I installed freebsd, to later go to openbsd and Linux.
And the first thing I do on my android phone is to install hp48 emulator.
Most of the people who were active in the HP48 scene turned out to be good to great coders with a good knack for low-level optimization.
You may have heard of LZ4 or ZStd, the author is a French guy (currently employed by Facebook) who started hacking compressors on his HP48, this is how I met him a long time ago.
Im 43 it guy and started playing with hp at 12, my own first « computer » with countless hours: playing, coding, debugging, reading txt files. Naturally when I bought my first intel computer at 19yo I installed freebsd, to later go to openbsd and Linux.
And the first thing I do on my android phone is to install hp48 emulator.