Elkectronic Calculators

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An excerpt from A New History of Modern Computing, MIT Press, © 2021, pgs. 168-170

     Electronic Calculators
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     Calculators were the first civilian counterpart to the Minuteman and Apollo programs of the 1960s, creating a market …
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     Hewlett-Packard stunned the market in early 1972 with the HP-35, a $400 pocket calculator that performed all the logarithmic and trigonometric functions required by engineers and scientists. Within a few years the slide rule joined the mechanical calculator on the shelves of museums. Chuck House, an engineer involved with the early Hewlett-Packard calculators, said, “One could uncharitably say that we invented essentially nothing; we simply took all the ideas that were out there and figured out how to implement them cost-effectively.”
     The first programmable pocket calculator was Hewlett-Packard’s HP-65, introduced in early 1974 for $795. Texas Instruments and others soon followed. These machines could compute logarithms and trigonometric functions and carry out floating-point arithmetic to ten decimal digits of precision. Few mainframes could match that without custom-written software. They could also store and execute short programs, which proved captivating to some users who began to take their calculators home to play with. Most were adult professionals, including civil and electrical engineers, lawyers, financial people, pilots, and so on, with a practical need for calculation … . They did not fit the profile of hackers as kids with “their rumpled clothes, their unwashed and unshaven faces, and their uncombed hair …" But their passion matched the programming enthusiasts’ at MIT. Their numbers, increasing as the prices of calculators dropped, were the first indication that personal computing was truly a mass phenomenon. There may never have been more than a few hundred people fortunate enough to be allowed to “hack” on a computer like the PDP-10. By 1975, there were over 25,000 HP-65 programmable calculators in use.
     As powerful as the programmable calculators were, the trade press was hesitant to call them computers, even though Hewlett-Packard used the term personal computer in its advertising as early as 1968. Hewlett-Packard and Texas Instruments sold the machines as commodities; they could ill afford a sales force able to walk a customer through the complex learning process needed to get the most out of one. Calculators were designed to be easy enough to use to make that unnecessary, at least for basic tasks. When customers wanted to do more, they turned to one another. Users’ groups, clubs, newsletters, and publications proliferated.

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