HP-55 celebration

[Namir]

Today I celebrate 48 years since I bought my first HP calculator, the HP-55. I was vacationing in Switzerland. The local HP dealer in Lausanne refused to detax the calculators as most foreigners who bought calculators from him failed to do the detax formality upon exiting Switzerland. This caused the dealer to pay the sales tax out of his pocket. So my (older) brother decided to drive us to Geneva (the center of HP in Europe) and called one of their numbers asking where to buy it and explaining that we live in the middle east. They directed us to the Geneva airport. We found a store there that carried HP, TI, Sharp, Casio, and so on. They had the HP-55 and the salesman accepted to do the detax since we told him we would be leaving Switzerland from the Geneva airport.

Upon arriving on August 15, 1975, my family handed me flyers for many HP calculators (HP-21, HP-45, HP-25, HP-55, and HP-65). Since in lived in the Middle East where repairing an HP calculator (especially the card reader of the 65) would be impossible. I chose the HP-55 because it had a lot of built in functions (including the linear regression), 20 memory registers, a timer (that I can use as an engineering student), and a modest number of programming steps (which I always pushed to the limit).

Two ears later I was able to get an HP-67 locally and enjoyed the memory registers, merged programming steps, and the card reader!

Namir

[carolinahomes]

I commend you for your dedication to RPL and thank you for sharing that story. All of us here have their own heartfelt stories with their first HP calculator which we should share more often with the younger generations despite their reluctance to hear it.