Multiply: The Francis Hookham Collection

[Mark Power]

Members of HPCC recently visited the Whipple Museum of the History of Science at Cambridge University, which houses the Francis Hookham Collection of Hand Held Calculators. The museum published a full-colour catalogue of the collection and, following our visit, have kindly made it available for everyone to download as a PDF.



There are a few mistakes in the book, including rather disappointingly that the HP-35 was introduced by Texas Instruments, but some gems of information as well. The researcher tried the keyboards of all the 400+ calculators in the collection and described the key movement of each. We could argue that the HP-41C keyboard is not best described as "short-travel, light and squishy, no click" when "perfect, positive action and pleasant click" might have been better.

The catalogue is well worth a look even though there are few HP calculators in the collection compared to some other makes. The collection is also searchable online, where there are more photographs of the calculators. Try searching for "hewlett".

If you are in Cambridge (UK) the museum is definitely worth a visit.

[Garry Lancaster]

Thanks, that's lovely!

I didn't know about this museum; will definitely try to pay a visit sometime. Cambridge also has the Centre for Computing History, which is well worth a visit: http://www.computinghistory.org.uk

[EdS2]

Thanks Mark - some good reading and links to follow!