My personal calculator history

[gentzel]

I think I first became aware of HP scientific calculators from advertisements in Scientific American when I was in middle school. Could also have been Popular Electronics. I sent away for a catalog (likely one of those "circle the numbers and send in the card" things) which ended up being The Hewlett-Packard Personal Calculator Digest (volume 1, 1976). I had a 4-banger (Novus 850) but this was a whole new world. The HP-67 was my dream, but way beyond my middle school budget. And I remember reading about RPN and thinking "Yeah, that makes perfect sense."

I'm not being dramatic when I say that The Hewlett-Packard Personal Calculator Digest changed my life. I still remember vividly reading "Micro-Code: Electronic Building Blocks for Calculators" in volume 3 (1977). That article made me say "This is amazing! I want to be an Electrical Engineer". And while I ultimately ended up in CS instead, the path was clearly started by that publication.

It wasn't until senior year of high school (1979) that I had a part-time job that allowed me to actually purchase one of these miracles. Another vivid memory is driving to Penn State Beaver Campus bookstore to buy my HP-34C. I loved that machine. It was the first "programming" I ever did and was a huge help in my first Calculus course.

Enter college. I don't remember what happened to the 34C, but somehow it was gone, probably stolen (the start of a sad pattern). Picked up an HP-41CV as its replacement and it was a blast. Started to dabble in synthetic programming... until I left it in the common area after a study session. Went back 15 minutes later but it was gone. Sigh...

Next came the HP-15C. Another great calc (though the form factor change took some getting used to)... until it was stolen from my apartment (along with my Olympus camera) during Christmas break. At this point I'd started to shift from EE to CS and didn't have as great a need for a high quality calculator so I did without for a while.

Once I started my first real job, I picked up an HP-28C. Love-hate relationship with that thing. Loved RPL, loved the multi-line display, mostly loved the form factor, hated the extremely small memory. Picked up Customize Your Hp-28 by W.A.C. Mier-Jedrzejowicz. When the HP-28S came out I was both excited and annoyed - only a year later? Really? But I had to have it!

Then came an HP-48SX, then HP-48GX. Great machines (despite the performance issues with the GX UI).

Also at some point someone listed NOS HP-16Cs somewhere (don't recall where). It was just the bare calc+case, with a laser printed manual. Ended up selling that one years later at a significant profit.

Then... sadness. While Meta Kernel, Erable, and ALG48 were awesome, the move to Australia led to the end of decades of great physical machines. Blue plastic? Rubber keys? Tiny Enter key at the bottom? What? I picked up a 49G just to try it, but it was awful. Great software imprisoned by terrible physical design. Its still in a box somewhere, and I don't miss it.

I then ignored HP for years. It was fun to see the 12C become so ubiquitous, and still for sale in office supply stores, but that was the end of the "old HP" from my perspective.

So why did I come back? Well, after years away, I got a craving to replace my old 34C. So I started Googling, and searching eBay, and was somewhat shocked by what I found. HP-15C CE? SwissMicros clones? DB48X? PX41CX? Multi-calc? What??? This is amazing (and potentially expensive)!

And so here I am, reinfected with the HP bug years later. A 15C CE beside me, another on order, a 12C converted to a 16C (with overlay), a 34C arriving in the mail any day now, and I'm sure many more to come.