HP Calculators script

HAWFWB

This will be the first in a series of videos on calculators – essentially MY calculators. I know
what you may be thinking – CALCULATORS?

Well, as I am sure many watch collectors do, I have other interests and hobbies. One of them is
calculators – specifically HP calculators. I have been using them since the mid 1970s. I use
them now, collect them, and just admire the quality, features and usability of these machines.

Sure, everyone who has a smart phone has a calc app on it and can easily do a quick calculation.
But for more serious calculations, those involving trig, log or other higher order functions, you
need a serious machine. And HP made serious scientific and professional machines starting in
the 1970s and continuing until now. And if you want to do repetitive calculations, nothing
beats a programmable calculator and HP made the best.

There are many calculator emulators for IOS, Android, Mac and Windows platforms. . I have
and use several on various laptops and smart phones. But there is nothing like pressing the keys
on a extremely well-built, solid calculator and seeing the results displayed in those glowing red
LED digits – or the crisp black on gray LCD screens. I know spreadsheets have pretty much
taken over the world when it comes to analyzing tabular data, graphing and business modeling.
I use spreadsheets every day in my daily work and even for personal use. But I still use various
calculators and enjoy them very much.

The first calculator I remember coming into my household in the early 1970s was the TI
Datamath2500

The Datamath was a basic arithmetic calculator with 8 digits precision and algebraic logic (it
had an equals key). With 4 functions and 18 keys it was one of the first of basic calculators
available to consumers. It had a typical LED (light-emitting diode) display as had its
competition and used AA batteries for power.

The Datamath had a % key as did many similar calculators of the time. I never understood why
this key was needed since I know I learned that percents could be represented as a decimal
value. E.g., if you wanted to take 58% of 350, you just need to multiple 350 by point 58.
Seemed like this was a waste of a key on the limited keyboard real estate.
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However, my recollection of how I felt at the time was that an electronic calculator was quite
amazing piece of technology. It sure made it easy to balance the checkbook and do routine if
not simple calculations. The Datamath was manufactured in USA.

The first calculator I owned and one I had in college was the TI SR11 – in 1973. Being, dare I
say, I life-long nerd, I clearly remember carrying SR-11 on my belt in its case. The SR-11 is an
arithmetic calculator with 8 digits precision, a 12-digit display and algebraic logic, similar to the
Datamath mentioned before. It has 10 functions, 24 keys and typical of calculators of this era,
an LED display. Power was provided by 3xAA batteries.

This was a great choice for me because I did a lot of statistics at the time and therefore having
square root, squared and inverse function keys were extremely helpful. I had less if any need for
trig functions so their absence from the keyboard was not significant. And the Pi key, as cool as
it was to have a Pi value to 8 digits right at my fingertips, was rarely used. The constant switch
was handy for repetitive calculations. I also liked the change sign key at the bottom of the
keyboard.

The SR-11 was billed as an electronic slide rule, hence the “SR” in the name. The keys are kind
of “clicky” but never gave me any problems of missed entry or double entries. I used this
calculator for over a year and was very happy with it.

Then I entered the world of HP calculators

I first became aware of HP calculators from my father, who was a Civil Engineer and
Hydrologist. He had an HP-35 and it seemed so futuristically fantastic, at least in the early
1970s. I didn’t quite GET the entry method – RPN or Reverse Polish Notation (I’ll do a
separate video on that) – at first, but soon learned it and came to appreciate its surprising
simplicity and unexpected power

During graduate school I worked as an Eng Asst in my father’s civil eng firm doing routine
calculations, some data analysis and other numerical/data chores. Fortunately, I got to use an
HP-35. I soon came to appreciate it as a tremendous time-saving tool. I quickly learned and
became fluent in the RPN entry method and the rest was history, as they say. . Calculator use
for me has not been the same since – I can barely use a non-RPN calculator. And certainly don’t
want to.

Then I spent about a month’s salary on an HP-65

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In late 1975 or early 1976 I knew I wanted an HP calculator and I wanted something that was
future proof, or at least something I could use immediately as well as grow with. At the time,
my choices were – and HP-35 that I was familiar with, and HP-45 with additional functions and
the HP-65 programmable with built in card reader for program storage.
Although it was a stretch, and my family and friends thought I was nuts to spend $800 on a
calculator, I did get one and looking back it was one of the best decisions I’ve made. Why?
Because I learned how to program using it – branching, looping, sub routines, logical analysis –
i.e. laying out a program logically and within the confines of the machine.

My technical interests and new-found knowledge of programming let to a 3-/12 year stint with a
computer timesharing company. There I did customer support, programming in BASIC (on an
IBM 370 mainframe) to handle customer input and application development in the company’s
proprietary software – report generation, financial modeling and forecasting and data analysis. I
ended up supporting the national AT&T account and with that, my degrees in Psychology and
technical interest, I next joined Bell Laboratories for 8 years.

So I’ve always thought that purchasing that expensive HP-65 – over $3400 in today’s dollars –
was a good decision. Plus it made me a life-long Hewlett Packard calculator enthusiast. What
could be more fun than that?

Here is part of my collection – the classic series of HP handhelds:

HP-35,45, 65,67. I have an HP-80 somewhere, but can’t seem to find it.

The HP-35

HP calcs revolutionized the work of engineers, scientists and technical professionals.

Previously, slide rules were used and they were very good at multiplication, division, trig
functions, logs and exponents. Good to about 3 decimal places. However, slide rules could not
do addition and subtraction and, one had to keep track of the decimal place which, if you
chained calculations, affected the accuracy of the result, especially with each successive
calculation.
The HP-35 was HP’s first pocket calculator and was introduced in 1972 at a cost of $395. Up
till that time, most slide rule calculators had 4 basic functions plus the occasional exponent, log
or Pi functions. All with 8 digit accuracy of course and no need to keep track of the decimal
point The HP-35 was the first pocket calculator with trig functions, the first with HP’s RPN
entry method with a 4-level stack, and the first electronic calculator that was built tough and
designed to be repaired. Industrial design was a key design decision – all screws are hidden, the

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keyboard is divided into groups and color coded based on function, and even the most used
keys had a higher contrast of their labelling.

One quick note on the integrity of HP and the HP-35 in particular. Apparently a bug was
discovered with the exponent function after about 25000 calculators were shipped. Dave
Packard decided to tell everyone about the bug an offer a free replacement to anyone who asked
for it. As it turned out, about 25% of the units were returned as most owners decided to keep
their HP-35 AND the letter offering a replacement from HP.

HP-45

Next, HP introduced HP-45 a year later with more functionality – it had factorials, polar
coordinate calculations, trig in degrees, radians and gradians. The HP-35 could only do trig in
degrees. The HP-45 could also do conversions such as decimal degrees to
degrees/minutes/seconds. And it also do simple stats – mean and std deviation. Other
improvements included 9 storage registers instead of one, and the ability to do what is called
storage register arithmetic where one could perform operations on the contents of individual
storage registers rather than having to recall values, perform operations on them and then store
the results.

The HP-45 was the first HP scientific calculator to have a shift key. This almost doubled the
number of functions available on the keyboard with minimal clutter. It also was more intuitive
and easier to use. For example on the HP-35, there are SIN, COS and TAN keys and a separate
ARC key. So if you wanted to get the Arc SIN of a value in the display, you’d press ARC and
the SIN keys. On the HP-45, ARC functions were sifted functions and labelled above the trig
keys. So to do the same calculation as above, you’d press the f (shift) key and then press SIN.
Still two key strokes, but more obvious perhaps and one less dedicated key on the keyboard.
Other natural pairings included common and natural logs, exponents and

Also new on the HP-45 was the display formatting. Unlike the HP-35 which had what is called
“standard formatting” where the decimal point placement and number of displayed digits is
determined by the calculator, the HP-45 allowed the user to determine the number of shown
digits in either scientific notation or “fixed decimal” mode where the number of desired decimal
places are shown. Scientific notation is useful when working with very large or very small
numbers. The number of decimal places (0-9) can be displayed. Again, the display is left-
justified and includes trailing zeros.

One other usability improvement of the HP-45 is notable – how it handled exponents. One
would say raise 3 to the 5th power, and it would make sense to perform that calculation as it is
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naturally said. That is the case on the HP-45. You press 3, ENTER, 5 f y^x. 243 is displayed.
On the HP-35, the calculator function was x ^ Y rather than y ^ X. So a little bit of mental
gymnastics was required since you had to perform either:

3, ENTER, 5, X<>Y, X ^ Y – more cumbersome than necessary

Or
5, ENTER, 3, X ^ Y – backwards to say the least

The HP-45 method of y ^ X has been standard on very HP calculator since the HP-45.

HP-65

The HP-65 was the first HP programmable calculator with permanent storage – it used small
magnetic cards to store programs which could later be read back into the machine. This negated
one of the main complaints of calculators of the day which was that when you turned off the
calculator, you lost its contents. Although the HP-65 was limited to only 100 steps, it was a
breakthrough machine and permitted keystroke programming – meaning the keystrokes you
used to solve a problem were the steps of the program it saved and could be used repeatedly
with different input values. A huge boon for doing repetitive calculations.
Introduced in 1974 at a cost of $795,

There were many interesting aspects of the HP-65. Foremost was that it had more or less the
same form factor as the HP-35, 45, 55, 80. It was release less than 2 years after the HP-35 and
was advertised by HP as a “personal computer”. This before that term had come into common
use. Most notable was the tiny magnetic cards that were used to write programs to and read
programs from. These little mag cards could hold 100 program steps, and each step was a
keyboard instruction represented by a key CODE. For example, the Enter hey was in the 4 th row
and 1st position or column, Therefore, its keycode is 41. Pretty straightforward given the LED
numerical display. It wasn’t until the HP 41C calculator, introduced 6 years later, that functions
could be displayed as their name (with an Alphanumeric display).

The tiny cards had a magnetic surface on one side and a writable surface on the other. The card
could be slid into a slot at the top of the calculator so as to label the top row of program-defined
keys. Some people, myself included, actually used rub-on letters to give the card labels a more
professional look. Users could also buy pre-made programs that came on mag cards which
could be read into the machine. These application pacs were available in a number of areas,
including math, aviation, statistics, EE, finanmce and many more. Up to 3 dozen program cards

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were provided in each pac, with pre-written and tested programs and a user manual was
provided with each.

The HP-65 took the idea of a shift key to provide more functions per key, perhaps to its limit.
There were 3 color-coded shift keys f, f-1, and g which provided up to four functions for each
key. The main key function, the shifted function (printed in gold above the key), the inverse of
the gold labelled function using the f-1 shift key and the blue labelled function on the face of
the key when used with the g key. Again, a very economical and clean keyboard layout.

Some additional fists for HP were: the ability to split the integer and fraction part of a number,
ability to do degrees minutes seconds arithmetic (adding and subtracting), OCT to Decimal
conversions and vice versa. The user manual was quite well done, explaining not just the
functions of the calculator but including sections suggesting orderly ways to create a program.
Plenty of example and well written text make the HP-65 manual easy to read and follow and a
harbinger of well written HP manuals to come.

Obviously, the most exciting aspect of the HP-65 was programming. It was an amazing
machine for its time and is still exceptional although it has been far surpassed in functionality
by various new calculators and computers. Programming was done via keystrokes and there
were 100 steps available for a program. No line numbers were provided, just the key code as
mentioned above. Labels (A-F) were used for function names and they could be called by either
pressing the Label key or as a subroutine from a GOTO statement. Four conditional tests
(between the x and y registers in the stack) and two flags were provided to allow conditional
branching. Programs could be stepped through one step at a time with a SST key but there was
no BACKSTEP key.

HP-67

The HP-65 was succeeded in 1976 with the introduction of the HP-67. This calculator could
also read and write data in addition to program steps like the HP-65, had more memory (224
steps instead of 100), used memory more efficiently than the HP-65 so you actually had more
equivalent steps (using mostly merged keystrokes instead of just some), better editing, better
comparisons and branching, nested subroutines and indirect addressing (it could use the value in
a stored register to determine to branch to that step number. And, it listed for $450. Simply
amazing.

The HP-67 calculator was the same form factor as the HP-65, but had a number of usability
improvements. One area was program storage and editing. Line numbers now accompanied
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each program step (shown in the display), a BST control to let you move backward through a
program and a GOTO control that allowed one to go directly to a specific program line number
in “Program” mode.

Like its predecessor, the HP-67 had 3 shift keys to access all of the functions on the keyboard
but now they were labelled “F”, “G” and “H”. Because of the increased number of functions on
the keyboard and supposed customer feedback, the “F” and inverse “F” approach to shift keys
was abandoned. One other change, which took some previous HP-65 users to learn to adjust
(myself included back then) was that the additional functions on each key were labelled below
the key instead of above it. Fortunately, with use, it was a short learning curve. Another useful
feature was that when writing programs to the magnetic cards, the calculator modes were
included.

There were many improvements in the programming area as well. 3-level subroutine nesting
was available, comparisons could now be done between the X register (in the stack) and zero,
not just between the X and Y register, 4 flags were now included (one that indicated data entry),
looping could be done incrementally in addition to the previous calculator’s decrement looping
and there were now 10 instead of five user defined keys. The data entry flag was especially
useful for allowing a program to either accept an input or calculate a result when a program
used label keys to, say, enter 3 of 4 arguments and calculate the fourth.

Perhaps one of the most exiting programming improvements was the ability to do indirect
addressing. This was very powerful as it gave the user the ability to use a calculated value,
stored in a specific register, to control subroutine addresses, display format, control store and
recall addresses and act as a loop counter value. Using indirect addressing allowed for some
very creative and powerful programs to be written.

Other new features included the ability to read from and write data to the mag cards, merging of
partial program from cards with the current program either manually or under program control,
and 224 step memory with 26 memories instead of the HP-65’ 100 step memory and nine
storage registers. And as before, the HP-67 was supported by a very large program library,
available as “Pacs” in a dozen categories. In addition, there were programs in “Solutions” books
spanning over 40 areas available to users.

The HP-67 lived for about 8 years – introduced in 1976 and retired in 1984. When it was first
available, it listed for $450 or a little more than half of what the HP-65 sold for just 2 years
earlier. Through more efficient chip count and content, HP was available to provide more
functionality in the HP-67 than the HP-65 at a lower cost.
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HP-80

Also in 1973, the HP-80 was introduced for financial professionals. It could do TVM and
compound interest calculations. Number of payments, interest rate, payment amount, present
value and future value. If you entered any 4 of these values, it would amazingly calculate the
fifth or unknown value. This became a theme for HP ads they introduced successive models –
some for scientific use and some for financial use.

I have an HP-80 that I obtained in the mid-1970s. Unfortunately, I cannot locate it. It’s around
somewhere, hopefully without the batteries stored in it.

Summary

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention of the best if not THE best resource for information on HP
calculators. It is the Museum of HP calculators. I’ll put a link in the description. The Museum
of HP Calculators describes and displays just about all HP calculators ever made – from 1968 to
about 2000. Also included are a few interesting later models. Each model is described
thoroughly, pictures are provided and detailed technical specs and anecdotes are available. For
the true HP calc enthusiast and for about $40, you can buy a thumb drive (I have) of
approximately 1700 documents including : HP manuals, applications Pacs, HP Digests, HP
Journals, HP Keynotes, programs and brochures in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format that may be
viewed or printed. There are also scanned books from Synthetix, Grapevine, D'zign, NASA,
additional images, etc.. This collection totals about 14GB of information, much of it in colour.

Both the Museum web site which is free and the Thumb Drive are highly recommended. Dave
Hicks, a self-described HP calculator addict since the age of 13, has done an excellent job
curating the info and providing a place for like-minded HP nuts (myself included) to learn about
and share HP info and lore. Thanks Dave.

In my next video, I will discuss the HP RPN entry method, how it compares to the algebraic
method and why it is more efficient and actually easier to use. At least for me.

Future videos will include a tour of the rest of my calculator collection, a brief overview of my
two calculator-related master’s degrees,
One comparing keyboard layouts 0 calculator vs. phone
The other comparing AOS and RPN dat entry
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Also a review of usability in HP calculators and a first look at some recent modern versions of
classic HP calculators.

Thanks for watching and I’ll see you next time.

__________________________________________________________________
HP calcs #2

HAFWB

Algebraic notation

Reverse Polish Notation

Infix
Polish
Reverse Polish

The stack- odd at first, but not so odd concept

Use HP 45 then HP 42s
Use DM42 to show stack operation

HP calcs #3

The rest of the collection

HP calcs #4

Calculator keyboard layout – telephone vs. adding machine

Master’s thesis
Apparatus
Digital electronics

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HP calcs #5

Usability with HP calculators

HP calcs #6

AOS . RPN
Master’s thesis
HP-41
Simulating entry methods, Collecting data, data analysis all on HP-41
Results

HP calcs #7

Modern and advanced machines

Swiss Micros, etc.
Collecting
Simulations
PC
IOS

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HP Calc Notes
HP calcs revolutionized the work of engineers, scientists and financial professionals
Slide rules – multiplication, division, trig functions, logs, exponents. Good to about 3 decimal places. No addition and
subtraction
Had to keep track of the decimal place yourself and if you chained calculations, accuracy suffered with each successive
calculation
Basic slide rule calculators e.g. HP-35 in 1972 ate the slide rules lunch. Could do basic slide rule functions plus addition
and subtraction. Could also do trif functions and inverse trig functions, exponents, roots. All with 8 digit accuracy and no
need to keep track of the decimal point
Next, HP introduced HP-45 a year later with more functionality – factorials, polar coordinate calculations, trig in degrees,
radians and gradians. HP-35 could only do trig in degrees. Could also do conversions such as decimal degrees to
degrees/minutes/seconds. Also do simple stats – mean and std deviation

Also in 1973, HP-80 was introduced for financial professionals. Could do TVM and compound interest calculations.
Number of payments, interest rate, payment amount, present value and future value. If you entered any 4 of these
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values, it would amazingly calculate the fifth or unknown value. This became a theme for HP ads they introduced
successive models – some for scientific use and some for financial use.

HP-65 was first HP programmable with permanent storage – it used small magnetic cards to store programs which could
later be read back into the machine. This negated one of the main complaints of calculators of the day which was that
when you turned off the calculator, you lost its contents. Although the HP-65 was limited to only 100 steps, it was a
breakthrough machine and permitted keystroke programming – meaning the keystrokes you sued to solve a problem
were the steps of the program it saved and could be used repeatedly with different input values. A huge boon for doing
repetitive calculations.
Introduced in 1974 at a cost of $795,

The HP-65 was succeeded in 1976 with the introduction of the HP-67. This calculator could also read and write data
inadition to program steps, had more memory (224 steps instead of 100), used memory more efficiently than the HP-65
so you actually had more equivalent steps (using merged keystroked), better editing, better comparisons and branching,
nested subroutines and indirect addressing (it could use the value in a stored register to determine to branch to that
step number. And, it listed for $450. Simply amazing.

In 1979, HP introduced the HP-41C which made all of the previous HP (and other brands like TI) calculators obsolete. It
was not just a calculator but a platform – using the expansion ports, it offered plug-in ROM programs, peripherals such
as a card reader, printer, bar code reader and tape drive. Additional memory could be added as well as advanced
functionality via the expansion ports.

HP also introduced at the time, the HP-IL interface that let the HP-41 control test equipment, talk to the standard HP-IB
interface, video screen and more. The 41 also had an alphanumeric screen – with actual descriptive names for functions,
not just key codes representing the key placement on the keyboard. It also had continuous memory so program and
data contents were not lost when the machine was turned off. And it was low power so the batteries lasted weeks not
hours like previous early models. It was truly a revolutionary calculator/computer and its life spanned 11 years until
about 1990 in various iterations.

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