HP-35 - Calculator Trivia

Calculator Trivia

• The HP-35 was 5.8 inches (150 mm) long and 3.2 inches (81 mm) wide, said to have been designed to fit into one of William Hewlett's shirt pockets.
• Is the first scientific calculator to fly in space (along with the HP-65 and HP-41) in 1972
• Is the first pocket calculator with a numeric range that covered 200 decades (10+/-100)
• The LED display power requirement was responsible for the HP-35's short battery life between charges — about three hours. To extend operating time and avoid wearing out the on/off slide switch, users would press the decimal point key to force the display to illuminate just a single LED junction.
• The HP-35 calculated arithmetic, logarithmic, and trigonomic functions but the complete implementation used only 767 carefully chosen instructions (7670 bits).
• Introduction of the HP-35 and similar scientific calculators by Texas Instruments soon thereafter signaled the demise of the slide rule as a status symbol among science and engineering students. Slide rule holsters rapidly gave way to "electronic slide rule" holsters, and colleges began to drop slide-rule classes from their curricula.
• 100,000 HP-35 calculators were sold in the first year, and over 300,000 by the time it was discontinued in 1975—3½ years after its introduction.
• In 2007 HP introduced a revised HP 35s calculator in memory of the original.
• An emulation of the HP-35 is available for the Apple iPhone and iPad.