Cover Girl HP-65

[Jim Horn]

(03-24-2014 09:59 PM)BobVA Wrote:  I remember poring over SA issues in the library while in middle school, staring at the unattainable Curta's advertised (with a line-drawing!) every month.
The physics teacher at my high school got an HP-35 when they were first introduced and brought it down to our electronics class. You'd think Joe Namath had walked in, the way the poor guy got mobbed.

My senior college year, 1975, an IEEE Fellow was teaching Digital Signal Processing. One class, I noticed that he had a new leather case on his belt, similar to the HP-35 and HP-45 cases I had seen wealthier students carrying, but noticeably thicker. During a lull in the lecture, I asked if that was a (just introduced) HP-65. Surprised, he replied that it was.

The entire room gasped. He took a step back and said, "This is *not* leaving my belt!"

A student quipped, "That's OK, we can cut you in two!"

At the end of the class, we all crowded around the front desk as he demonstrated his '65 which cost a month's pay for many back then.

I never had a '65, having started with a '25 (after graduating still using a slide rule) but certainly understood the excitement...