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HP Calculators refer to various calculators manufactured by the Hewlett-Packard company over the years.

Contents 1 History 2 Characteristics 3 Calculators 4 External links

In the 1960s, Hewlett-Packard was becoming a diversified electronics company with product lines in electronic test equipment, scientific instrumentation, and medical electronics, and was just beginning its entrée into computers. The corporation recognized two opportunities:

• It might be possible to automate the instrumentation that HP was producing, and
• HP's customer base would likely buy a product that could replace the slide rules and adding machines that they were now using for computation.

With this in mind, HP built the HP 9100 desktop scientific calculator. This was a fully-featured calculator that not only included standard "adding machine" functions but also included powerful capabilities to handle:

• Floating point numbers
• Trigonometric functions
• Logarithms, exponentiation, and square roots

This was an excellent machine and was well received by the customer base, but William Hewlett saw additional opportunities if the desktop calculator could be made small enough to fit into his shirt pocket. He charged his engineers with this exact goal (to the point that they measured his shirt pocket!).

The result was the HP-35 calculator. This calculator provided functionality that was revolutionary for a pocket calculator at that time, and it did fit into Bill Hewlett’s shirt pocket. Through the years, HP released several calculators that varied in their mathematical capabilities, programmability, and I/O capabilities. Some of them could be used (via HP-IL) to control the instruments other Hewlett Packard divisions produced.

HP Calculators are well-known for their use of Reverse Polish notation.

Programmable HP calculators allow users to create their own programs as well as share them over the internet.

Below are some of HP’s calculator models produced over the years, in numeric rather than chronological order:

• HP 9G - Graphing calculator designed by Kinpo Electronics, Inc.
• HP-12C – The financially centric calculator from the HP-10 series introduced in the 1980s. The longest running product in the HP calculator line, it remains in production.
• HP-20S -- A basic scientific calculator, using infix notation, barely programmable and with no graphing capabilities.
• HP-25 - The Owner's Handbook is dated 1975. Programs could be written with up to 49 steps, its batteries were rechargeable with charger included. Reverse Polish notation (RPN) was used.
• HP 30s - Calculator designed by Kinpo Electronics, Inc.
• HP 33s - Calculator designed by Kinpo Electronics, Inc.
• HP-35 -- The original
• HP-38G -- a simplified successor to the HP-48, using infix notation.
• HP-39g series - A successor to the HP-38, using infix notation.
• HP-40 series. A successor to the HP-38, using infix notation.
• HP-41 series – Three models in this series were released over its lifetime, the 41C, 41CV, and 41CX. The 41C had user configurable program steps and memory registers, alpha-numeric display, user programmable key mappings, and 4 expansion ports that could hold additional memory, an interface to HP-IL peripherals, a magnetic card reader/writer, or commercial application programs. The 41CV quadrupled the amount of base memory, and the 41CX added a clock and some additional functions and memory.
• HP-42S – a non-expandable follow-up to the HP-41 series. It included a two line display (dot addressable) and featured built-in matrix and complex number mathematics.
• HP-48 series. Historically one of the most popular models among engineers; programmable and with graphics.
• HP-49 series. Enhanced versions of the 48 series. Later models designed by Kinpo Electronics, Inc.
• HP50g - Latest released
• HP-67 and HP-97

• HPMuseum.org Museum of slide rules and significant HP calculators
• HPCalc.org Information about and software for HP programmable calculators
• MyCalcDB HP calculators list.