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Enter > Equal

Posted by Steven F Johnson on 11 Feb 2010, 7:34 p.m.

I was an undergrad physics major in the early 1970s when the HP-35 came out. Ads in Scientific American and the Society of Physics Students magazine were very appealing, but it took quite an effort for our family to scrape together the cost. We finally traveled to the HP store in downtown Chicago one afternoon and, with a great deal of ceremony, bought the calculator.

Imagine my horror later that summer to find my calculator slumped and melted in my car, parked out in the hot Chicago summer sun. I couldn't face my parents after all they'd done to procure it, so I made a hasty call to the HP service bureau in suburban Skokie. They invited me to stop by, and 20 minutes later I was standing at the counter in the lobby, watching traffic whizz by on the Edens Expressway.

After some embarrassed explanation from me, a very kind HP technician replaced the case of the calculator, ran it through its paces, and handed it back to me, at no charge. Then, the magic words: "Want to come back here and see our Cesium Atomic Clock?" He gave me a great tour of the instruments, test equipment, etc. that they had in service, and cemented a life-long bond with HP instruments, data acquisition equipment, calculators, and desktop computers.

I've got an HP 35s at hand now, and a half-dozen HP calculators, all in great working condition, with the original HP 35 on display in a curio cabinet at home.

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