How do you like the Woodstock calculators?

[Tom Flatterhand]

Last week I bought an optically mint HP-29C at auction and it immediately became the star of my small collection. Why is that?

When I was 12, I bought a Privileg PR-56 D-NC from the German mail order company Quelle. This calculator had only 72 program steps and unfortunately they couldn't accommodate keyboard shortcuts either. As a comparison condition, there was only a test for negative numbers. That was all and still I learned programming with it and it certainly influenced my further life. In my collection there are also a HP-41CX and a HP-42S (whose non-contrast display is just bad) and also calculators of other brands. However, I could not afford these devices in my youth. At that time I would have always liked to have a Hewlett-Packard! With the HP-29C I have the feeling to hold one of the first programmable calculators ever in my hands. Compared to my Privileg PR-56 D-NC, it is so much better, even though it is from the same era.

For example the 8 comparison conditions, which in many cases make complicated detours in the code unnecessary, indirect addressing of the registers, the 3 subroutine levels, the labels, 'continuous memory', the 98 combined steps, the keys, the nice case, its compactness, the processing. You know it all.

To me, this calculator has the essential essence of all programmable calculators. Even though the HP-25 and HP-65 were the very first, you could say that the HP people were still practicing a bit there and only the HP-29C has everything that was really necessary for a simple programmable calculator! Of course, nowadays I don't really want to develop a big program on it. This is much better with Eclipse or Visual Studio. A programmable calculator is just not suitable for that. That's why it makes no sense that they get more and more memory or alphanumeric displays. Ok, that was already nice with the HP-41C or the Casio FX-602P (Whose LCD matrix display is very good) . But with this it is also good.

As someone here already wrote: Just quickly type in the formula for calculating the parallel resistor and do some calculations, those are their real tasks. But: Without Continuous Memory these things are just extremely annoying. A card reader will always break and I don't need a printer to experience the pure pleasure of programming. I love pulling my new old HP-29C out of a bag and putting it in my hand. It looks like it did on a brochure from back in the day and takes me back to a time when I was happy when the program to calculate the GGT's ran correctly for the first time.