HP-55… Any takers

[Steve Simpkin]

The HP-55 came out around Jan 1975 for $395 which was about 1/2 the price of the HP-65 ($795). Even though it lacked the card reader and had about 1/2 the programming steps compared to the HP-65, it had a timer, metric/english conversions and 11 more memory registers, and a price was hard to beat at the time. The problem was that about 8 months later, the HP-25 came out for $195, about 1/2 the price of the HP-55. While the HP-25 lacked the timer, metric/english conversions and had 12 fewer memory locations, it was more compact, had ENG notation, storage arithmetic and most importantly, fully merged program steps. At $195 it probably greatly reduced the sales of the HP-55.

https://www.hpmuseum.org/cgi-bin/compare...ne&diff=ON