Tuesday, June 23, 2009

The electronic slide rule

HP-35

The HP-35 was the world's first pocket electronic scientific calculator.

It was introduced in January 1972 by Hewlett-Packard and had the equivalent of 30,000 transistors. It sold for $395.

Hewlett-Packard sold over 100,000 of the HP-35s the first year.

The introduction of the HP-35 and other electronic calculators that followed marked the end of the mechanical slide-rule as a primary problem solving device.

The HP-35 was known as the "electronic slide rule."

2 comments:

  1. Great thing to invent or should I say to improve (from the manual slide rule). Again it is something that meant to save lots of time. I remember math classes when the teacher were explaining us how to solve mathematical problems using the long way and right after showing us how it is done in seconds using the slide rule. With time these slide rules became much more sophisticated and there are many more functions and ways to solve mathematical problem just by plugging in numbers. I noticed the longer you use it you became depended on in to get a solution. This is the huge reason I don`t like them to be used too often and almost for every math problem. It causes to delay in thinking; instead of trying to find a way to solve the problem we are just ‘plugging in’. As I read in my sociology book about how now days education – we make things easier and the level raises automatically. Not the smartest thing to do isn`t it?

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  2. I actually think my father still has one of those things. I found it interesting to learn about the first copier and the ball point pen. One thing I didn’t know about was the whole hand held slate tablets. Thinking about it now I’m pretty sure I’ve seen them in several movies. I just never paid any mind to something so technologically inferior. I guess society has trained us to only recognize the new and present technology while over looking something so old and out of date.

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