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Full Name (family, given): Butts, Ed
Email: epbpe@juno.com
Location: Salem Oregon
Entered: 17 July 2005, 3:49 p.m.

Hello, my exposure with small calculators coincidently began with my engineering career during the late 1970's-early 1980's. Although I know that I owned a few small calculators in college, I was one of the dying breed who was actually taught to use a slide rule in high school. I became so proficient at using that slide rule that I used my trusty 12" Pickett (which I still have) through all four years! It wasn't until my exposure to the EIT (Engineer in Training) exam in 1983 that I decided I had to break away from slide rules and use a calculator instead. Even then, the time crunch of an EIT exam was simply too great for a slide rule. My first calculators were an HP model 11C and a TI (don't shoot me) model 55, later the 55II. I soon began hating the slanted version of the TI-55II and found I couldn't work with anything but RPN logic. I passed my EIT exam in 1983, my PE exam in 1986, and became a Staff, then later, Chief Engineer, Vice President, and President for a local large design-build firm specializing in water and wastewater work. I ultimately purchased it in 1997. By 2004, after over 25 years of service to the same firm, however, my family convinced me that the stress of running such a large firm was slowly killing me and I sold the company in the summer of 2004. Instead of retiring at the ripe age of 48, I now run a small engineering firm with my daughter and everybody is much happier these days. For what it is worth, I am a Registered Professional Engineer in Civil, Environmental, Electrical, and Control Systems Engineering, Board Certified in Environmental Engineering, Forensic Engineering, Irrigation Design, and Plant (facilities) engineering. I am a member of Oregon's State Board of Engineering Examiners, serve on several state and national water and engineering related advisory committees, and am listed in Who's Who in Science and Engineering and Who's Who in America. I started to collect HP calculators mostly on a whim after I realized what some of my old calculators were worth. My son, who is not an engineer, and I work together on our collection and we now own over 40 items, from an HP10C to an HP9815.

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