On February 1, 1972, Hewlett Packard introduced the world’s first scientific pocket calculator, the HP-35. You may be thinking, really, who cares but a bunch of geeks. That’s exactly what the marketing people at HP thought when Bill Hewlett released the thing too. They didn’t really anticipate that the device would not only sell at triple the rate HP had predicted, or revolutionize the world as we knew it by replacing the slide ruler. But it was, in a certain way, the iPhone of its time. The HP-35 paved the way for personal tech, and introduced an entire generation to the joys of computation and basic programming.
Oh, and Snake.
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And it was sexy. Bill Hewlett wanted to design a device that was capable of quickly and accurately executing complicated functions and algorithms that engineers could also fit in their shirt pockets. Originally HP had predicted that if they could sell 10,000 calculators, they would break even. In an initial market study, reviewers said the device would be too expensive, but HP continued with production. They sold 100,000 calculators in the first year. People were selling their cars to buy them. By 1975, HP had sold 300,000 HP-35’s.
In many ways the HP-35 was the thinking person’s smartphone. In fact, the specs of the HP-35 were not so different from those of an ipod or any mobile device. The calculator weighed in at 9 ounces, and sold for $395. It had exactly 35 buttons, a tilted screen for easy desk placement, and yes, it fit in a shirt pocket.
Even decades later, the scientific calculator remains a milestone in modern tech innovation, and served as a precursor to many of the personal tech devices and gadgets we use and operate on a daily basis. It was a total game changer. And while these days, the scientific calculator may be increasingly at risk of making the list of gadgets quickly receding from our collective memory and into obsolescence, it still remains a mainstay for many engineers, mathematicians, and calculus students around the world.
I bought my first TI-83 in 1997 for algebra. Granted I used it mainly for playing Snake and for programming the equations we learned so I could solve them during tests, and for many teens, even in the 90’s, it was our first introduction to handheld devices that were capable of complicated calculation and especially of programming. For an entire generation, the scientific calculator was an introduction to programming. By replacing the slide-ruler, the scientific calculator gave the common man the tool of automated computation, a breakthrough that made all of our current handheld tech possible. And maybe a bit more good-looking too.
