Musings of a Technonerd

An important date in Technonerd history passed last February 1st, and I didn't even notice it. It was the introduction of Hewlett Packard's venerable HP-35 scientific calculator, February 1, 1972. Its introduction, in one fell swoop, almost instantaneously relagated every slide rule in existence to the back corners of office and classrooms desks and turned them into historical oddities.


The thing was a technological marvel of it's time. There were no home computers yet, and businesses were just beginning to use some of the first generations of mainframes to do their accounting processing and such. What started as a desktop calculator turned, at the behest of the CEO of HP, into something he "could fit into my shirt pocket." Initial plans called for a production run of a mere 10,000 or so, due to the high cost. ($395.00 new. Almost $2,000.00 in today's money.) Production ran to 300,000 before the model was discontinued in 1975 for more advanced, programmable designs.

In 1972, I was one year into secondary school, learning the art of mechanical design The teacher bought one through the school for us to use, and we were all mesmerized by its ability to do trigonometric functions with ease. Square roots! Arcs! Sines! Cosines and tangents!! All at the mere touch of a button for crying out loud! No more laboring with paper, pencil, and slide rule. in 1976 I bought a used one from the company I worked for at the time for $20. It served me long and well before the red LED display started fading, and eventually burned out. It was replaced with a solar powered Texas Instruments (With a LCD display.) that I still own and use to this day.