37 Year Old Calculator Wins Award

April 16, 2009 by admin
Filed under: Gadgets

Rarely does a press release make such fascinating reading. The e-mail in question proudly boasts that the venerable HP-35 scientific calculator from, you guessed it, HP has won an award. The “IEEE Milestone in Electrical Engineering and Computing” award, to…

So good is the release that I have just pasted it straight into this post. A few additional facts not mentioned: When it went on sale in 1972, the calculator cost $395, which is around $2000 in today’s money. Despite this, HP still managed to shift 100,000 in the first year. That’s a lot of nerds. Keep reading to find out which tallest mountain in the world the HP-35 has been carried to the top of.

HP-35 Scientific Calculator Awarded IEEE Milestone [HP. Thanks, Jessica!]

Photo: Holger Weihe/Wikipedia

See Also:

The HP-35, named for its 35 keys, was the first handheld calculator to perform transcendental functions such as trigonometric, logarithmic and exponential functions.
At the time, contemporary calculators could only perform four basic functions – addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
The now classic “Reverse Polish Notation” (RPN) first used in the HP-35 has become the most efficient way known to computer science for evaluating mathematical expressions.
In the first three years after its introduction in 1972, sales of the HP-35 Scientific Calculator exceeded 300,000 units.
Forbes ASAP named HP 35 as one of the 20 “all time products” that have changed the world.
It was the world’s first handheld scientific calculator with a LED display.
HP-35 has traveled to the top of Mt. Everest for use in altitude and navigation calculations.
HP-35 is regularly used to navigate ships.
HP-35 has been used by astronauts aboard spacecraft to calculate the exact angle of re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere.