This is Technology Bytes, Episode 91 for December 2nd, 2024.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
So today I’m going very retro, and I’m talking about Hewlett-Packard calculators, or as I refer to them as HP.
That was the company that was the calculator company when I was a child, and through my high school years, actually through college.
And while it’s not a technology that I use on a regular basis, it is the technology that kind of got me in the mode of being a technology nerd, as it were.
And Hewlett-Packard was my first foray into that arena.
And there are emulators that I’ve used on my iPhone that make it act like a Hewlett-Packard calculator.
Those are pretty cool.
And they just hold a special place in my heart, and I have a collection.
So now you know how nerdy I am.
And the reality, I don’t know why I say that, and the cool thing is that I’m married to a woman who is okay with my nerdiness, and in our bookshelf in our living room, she has actually given me a shelf to show off my calculator collection.
So where did this all begin?
So I really have to blame my father for getting me into this arena of nerdiness, I guess, although he was not necessarily a nerd.
For some reason, Hewlett-Packard calculators spoke to his desire for a calculating device.
And they’re weird because they use a reverse polis notation, and if you’re unfamiliar with that, you hit a number, you hit enter, you hit the second number, and then you hit the operation.
And so it is a little strange and different than all the other calculators that you might use.
But he had a number of calculators that I used in my high school years and really fell in love with what HP does.
And all of the calculators that I used from Hewlett-Packard were programmable, so they allowed you to do things that maybe you would do on a regular computer these days.
But it was a really neat environment, and my dad enjoyed it, and I enjoyed it, and a couple of my brothers.
And so that’s kind of where my fondness for the Hewlett-Packard calculator brand started.
So I went to college in Oregon at Oregon State University, and Hewlett-Packard was the big company in that city for employing tech people.
And so I’ve been to that factory, not really inside it, just at the outside, but to see it.
And they supplied the calculators that were used in all the engineering labs that I took while I was there getting my bachelor’s degree in engineering.
And so it just continued to build my fondness for these calculators, and it was something that was kind of necessary.
And it’s interesting that by the time my son was in high school and needed a scientific calculator, that it seemed like Texas Instruments kind of took over.
But word up to me, and sometimes it was, he had the best of what Hewlett-Packard had to offer to do his scientific work at school as well.
And then while I was in college, a friend of mine knew that I enjoyed Hewlett-Packard calculators, and he let me know that a couple of the engineering labs were doing auction of Hewlett-Packard calculators for next to nothing.
And I ended up spending $10 and getting two boxes of Hewlett-Packard calculators, all kinds of vintage ones.
And so that’s really where my collection began.
And then I had more up-to-date, more recent, and again, we’re talking the mid to late 80s when I was in college.
And so I used a calculator that my dad had when I was in high school.
I used it for doing engineering work because the high school I went to offered some of those classes.
In fact, we did a surveying class that was a college-level class.
And the HP-41 that my dad had, you could actually purchase engineering packs that would plug into the calculator and offer you functionality beyond just what was there.
And surveying was one of those.
And so I actually got a job right out of high school before I went to college that senior year doing engineering work because I knew how to run the calculator for calculations coming from a surveying operation.
And so it really just built from there.
And then when I went to college, I ended up buying another calculator.
It’s actually the only one that I’ve ever seen that actually folds in half.
And so the left-hand side was all the programming available.
The right-hand side was your calculating interface.
And it was HP-28.
That took me through my college years.
And then after that, it was just a matter of kind of looking around and seeing what was there and figuring out maybe what I didn’t have.
And Hewlett-Packard came out with business calculators and scientific calculators.
And then maybe the most unique thing that I own is something my dad purchased when I was in high school.
And that’s the HP-001.
It’s the only watch that Hewlett-Packard ever made.
And when I was going to college and I had that watch and I was wearing it to church one day, I had a gentleman offer me $2,500 for my watch.
And I didn’t take it because I knew it was my dad’s.
He had given it to me, and so it was mine.
But I knew where it came from, and I knew that it was unique and that I would never, ever get rid of it.
And the offer was really not a price that would take that away from my collection.
And so today I’m sitting on, let’s see if I count correctly, like 14 to 16 calculators, varying degrees of vintageness amongst them.
I have ones that can tie to a plotter and print graphics for projects that you may be working on.
There’s just some really cool things in there.
One had a wand that allowed me to read programming lines by just swiping the wand across a barcode that would then program that in my calculator for me.
And then the printer would actually print those out to allow you to give it to friends.
Okay, if you had any friends, because you’re such a nerd.
But anyway, so looking at my collection, I’ve got a 22, I’ve got a 25, I’ve got a 29, a 32, a 34, a 37, a 55, a 67.
Those are just kind of progressive calculators through the years.
The 67 had a barcode reader and writer so you could actually write programs and save them.
The 41C had the same and similar setup.
I have a 10B, which is a business calculator, so it has different sets of calculations based on that.
The 48SX, a 28S, a 32S, and then the Apple Watch, the Apple Watch.
Oh, yeah, going back to my nerdiness.
The Hewlett Packard Watch, it is really cool.
So all of those things are not something that I use at tech on a daily basis, but it really was the vehicle that drew me into tech for my life.
And when I look back, it is where my love for technology started.
It didn’t hurt that my dad enjoyed it as well and that one of my brothers really enjoyed it as well.
And so just having that camaraderie around tech and now in the Apple world, having a similar thing with my son and my daughter and others in that community, it just continues to build my love for technology.
So where did it start?
Well, it started with Hewlett Packard.
Maybe even a little bit before, when I was nine years old, my dad brought a Sears and Roebuck catalog home.
We lived in Alaska.
That was the catalog that we ordered all our stuff from, asked us to pick something out, and I chose a calculator.
It wasn’t Hewlett Packard, probably because we couldn’t afford one, but my brothers were choosing bicycles and weightlifting sets and who knows what else, and I chose a calculator.
When I look back, you know, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, it might have had a memory function on it, and it had some scientific function as well, but very, very basic stuff.
And I gave it to one of my teachers before I left because I had already graduated at that time in high school to using Hewlett Packard stuff.
So just a little history of my life and technology and the calculator collection that I carry with me now.
That’s all from Hewlett Packard.
As always.
Oh, sorry.
That’s all I have for today.
As always, if you have any comments, suggestions, or questions, you can send them to technologybytesatmerigfamily.com.
That’s M E A R I G family.com.
I want to thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes microcast and this brief tour into my mind and my technology history.
I’m tripping over my own words.
And as always, I look forward to the next time we are together taking another bite of technology.
