Calculators with spreadsheets

[rprosperi]

(07-03-2018 10:21 PM)Garth Wilson Wrote:  The HP-75 had VisiCalc which was a huge investment to translate for the 75 and I'm sure it did not pay off monetarily. I can't imagine they sold nearly enough to have made it worth the investment.

This wasn't created from scratch, it was 'ported' from the Series-80 version of VisiCalc, which had very similar features and also shared the same CPU. Still, no doubt a lot of work, given the very different ROMs, memory, etc.

Also, to be useful on an HP-75, one really needs to use a monitor (a spreadsheet with a 1-line LCD display is real frustrating to use) so the cost of a 75 and IL/Video, and IL/storage, and likely an IL/Printer and 8K RAM upgrade meant that one was over $2k invested to be able to actually use it.

While there can be little doubt that this product was not profitable, I'd guess that HP saw the development cost as a strategic investment to market the first truly "portable spreadsheet" offering.

It's a nice implementation (for its time!) which exposes many features of the Spreadsheet functions to BASIC programs, and also lets you create custom worksheet functions in BASIC. Very nice, for the few well-financed folks that bought them.