Hewlett-Packard Calculators - The First Family

The first half of the 1970s was something of a boom time for calculator manufacturers, a situation triggered by the arrival of the first "calculator on a chip" integrated circuits in 1971, first from Mostek and later from [@Texas Instruments]. 

The machines were still something of a novelty and were often referred to as "portable computers", however they were sometimes staggeringly expensive - often costing a week's wages or more. 

The first pocket calculators, like the Japanese Busicom or the Bowmar Brain - otherwise known as the rebranded Commodore C110 - appeared in 1971[source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculator#Pocket_calculators], but it wasn't until machines like Sinclair's Executive of 1972 or Commodore's Minuteman series appeared that calculators could fit in actual shirt pockets.

A few years later, calculators would provide a path of natural progression to the manufacturing of computers for several companies, including Hewlett-Packard. 

[@Commodore] was another that followed this evolutionary trail, coming from office equipment manufacturing, moving on to adding machines and then into calculators in 1971 before launching the world's first "modern" personal computer - the [#PET] - in 1977.

Hewlett-Packard, on the other hand, came from a background of test equipment, instrumentation and medical electronics and saw calculators as something their customers could use instead of slide rules. 

Both companies managed to ride out the calculator wars of the middle 1970s, a financial bloodbath triggered by Texas Instruments' move in to the industry when it started producing its own calculators and selling complete machines for less than it sold the component chips to everyone else. 

Few companies survived, but HP did and it continues to manufacture specialist calculators as of 2025.

The itself advert features a good selection of HP's 1976 line of calculators, from the $80 HP-21 scientific - about [[55|1976]] in [[now]] -  right up to the staggeringly-expensive HP-97 - yours for $750. 

Even now, that would be a lot of money for a calculator, but it works out at around [[500|1976]] in [[now]] money - more than a reasonable second-hand car. 

At least the HP-97 offer "about 3.4 times the programming power" of the older HP-65, so it's totally worth it then.

