Anybody else had one? I don't remember the year, but it was a long
long time ago, in a galaxy far far away. It had a rechargeable
battery pack that lasted only a short while driving a red LED
display. I vaguely recall it had several registers ABCDEF that could
contain values, or something like that. I wonder if that was before
Apple started with its rudimentary PCs.
All calculators for what at the time seemed a long time had LED displays.
They generally did have rechargeable batteries because they drew a fare
amount of current with those displays. People forget that for a while
digital watches meant LED displays, and you had to press a button to see
the time, since the battery would barely last if the display was kept on
all the time. It's only in retrospect that LED displays lasted only a
short time on calculators and watches.
And there were a bunch of programmable calculators, from TI and others.
It didn't really take that long from the time the HP-35 was introduced in
1972 before there were programmable calculators of the same size. The
magnetic cards came along fast from both HP and TI, but there were others
that just had memory. I seem to recall that National had a cheap
programmable calculator fairly early on.
HP had a programmable in 1974, TI must have been around that time too.
TI had their SR-52 out in 1974, no magnetic cards, no programmable
modules.
To some extent, they were a fad, coming between the HP-35 that was a bold
move forward and small computers that tended to make programmables less
unique. Byte routinely covered programmable calculators for a brief few
years, they were seen as computers like the rest. There was one upmanship
as TI and HP jockeyed to be better than the other, and I'm sure there were
people who went through them all, wanting to have whater the latest best
was.
A lot of the features disappaered, made all simpler by semiconductor costs
making more programmable space cheap, and advances meaning the RAM could
be kept alive with just a trickle from the battery so whatever you'd
programmed in didn't keep disappearing and thus require magnetic strips to
reload it.
So programmable calculators faded to the background, they are still out
there, but somewhere over there. The period when you could get all kinds
of gizmos for them disappeared, so that base for the TI that allowed their
calculators to print is just a collector's item, as is the wave of pocket
calculators that were put in bigger boxes to make them desktop
calculators.
Steve Wozniak sold his HP calculator (and Steve Jobs sold his VW van) in
order to start Apple. I don't think the model was ever specified,
remember the HP-35 was hundreds of dollars when it came out, and likely
still carried a reasonable resale value at the time.
Michael
