Grimer wrote:
At 07:35 pm 05-05-05 -0400, you wrote:That was the HP-65 you're thinking of. It was programmable and read little mag cards. The HP-35 had no such option.
Jed Rothwell wrote:
By 1971 integrated circuits were already one of the largest industries on earth.Indeed. The HP35 scientific calculator was introduced when I was a sophomore at GaTech in 1973. It cost $635.
I got my lab to buy me one complete with little magnetic strip you could feed through them.
The HP-55 was an HP-65 without a card reader. Pretty useless, since it lost its memory when you turned the power off, and it used an LED display so you couldn't just leave it turned on all the time, but it was a lot cheaper than the 65 and I knew people who thought they were really cool.
I remember speculation that HP might conceivably introduce a version of the 55 which used core memory so it could retain its programs across power-offs, but of course core was already a dead-ended technology at that point.
