Ho John Lee’s Weblog

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an ad from HP noting the 25th anniversary of the HP12C calculator.

Unlike most contemporary personal computing technology, the old HP calculators have been nearly indestructable and are utterly reliable. This may have limited the market for HP calculators, in that there aren’t any consumables and there isn’t much of a replacement cycle either, but it’s a relic of the old-school HP that also made indestructable electronic bench equipment and atomic clocks (and mostly turned into Agilent). HP still seems to sell enough new units to keep them in production.

I’m not sure exactly how old my calculator is at this point, but it dates back to some time in the early 80’s, in the days before personal computers and ubiquitous internet access on college campuses, when being able to run repeated calculations without heading to the computer lab was both a luxury and a competitive advantage. At the time I also had an HP 15C and 16C, which were well-used in various projects before going on “permanent loan” years ago.

At this point my remaining 12C has been around the world several times, and the batteries haven’t been changed since sometime around the dot-com boom.

Some very good calculator software applications (including emulations of various HP calculators) are now freely available for PCs, and nearly-disposable plastic calculators are often distributed as promotional novelties.

I suspect that calculators like the 12C may be turning into something like fine pens. There’s little intrinsic, functional rationale for them at this point, but I enjoy using it nonetheless. It turns on and off instantly without a fuss, it is dense and substantial without being too heavy, has the best keyclick feel ever, and is a much better at being a calculator than a cellphone, PDA, or notebook computer is ever likely to be (…once you learn RPN). Like everyone else, I often write with a word processor of some sort, but I like to draft on paper from time to time, because writing with a good pen can make you think differently than typing into a display. I find that working with calculator and paper can have a similar feel. Sometimes computer productivity tools are better at creating the appearance of substance than at facilitating the creation of actual substance.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 13th, 2006 at 8:27 pm and is filed under Personal Technology, Front Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.