Size of the HP Community

[Maximilian Hohmann]

Hello!

That's a very interesting question that I ask myself from time to time too.

(08-28-2022 04:27 PM)johnb Wrote:  So... anyone have a decent estimate as to how many collectors of HP calculators there may be in the US, Europe, and Worldwide?

Absolutely not. When I watch the websites and videos of those conferences I see between 20 and 40 persons in the audience. But these are, so to say, the "inner circle" of the community. People who sacrifice lots of time and considerable funds to attend a single conference, not to speak of their calculator collections... Watching the prices of old calculators on eBay and similar sites (which is what I do since 25 years or so) I can only conclude that there must be many, many more collectors than those 30 conference attendees.
I myself have a decently paid job but traveling to the States for a three day hobby conference is totally outside my budget, both in terms of Euros and carbon footprint. But even if nobody has ever seen at a conference I consider myself to be a collector: I have more than 1000 pocket calculators, a litte less than 200 from HP maybe. My collection is neither systematic nor complete (see user "HP-Collection" from this site or datamath.org for comparison) but it exists. And there must be many, many more like myself. Still I couln't even guess their number to the order of magnitude (100? 1000? 10000?). Who knows.

Regards
Max

NB: Maybe, work permitting (this is gonna be on very short notice) I can attend Allschwil in October.