Harms believes that the 12c’s success was the result of uncompromising quality and an enormous amount of work and forethought plus a “certain amount of luck”, he acknowledges. It is no secret that Hewlett was a big fan of calculators. One of main reasons for the HP 12c’s success is the way it was designed at that time. “Stop making the HP 12c? Not likely” he says. He heard the rumor a few years ago that they will stop producing them, so he went out and bought another one, just in case. One in his briefcase, one on his desk, and another one for backup. Dale Kern, a Real Estate broker in Oregon has three of them. There are some people that trust no other calculator in the market to do the job. The algorithms used to perform calculations such as bond interest and partial payments on home mortgages were critical if the calculator was to be trusted by the financial world and meet the U.S. The designers packed a suite of financial functions and made the 12c so accurate that could win the approval of the National Bureau of Standards, making it suitable for the banking industry. Today it sells for $57 at Amazon and the HP web store, around 15% of the original price in today’s dollars. They were expensive, oh yes, the 12c retailed for $150 of 1981. The keys were solid, they had a unique feedback, and a mechanical click you could feel, making sure you really pressed the key. If you have not used an HP calculator in those years you don’t know what you missed. I was already a fan of HP calculators those were the equivalent of pocket computers for us in engineering school. ![]() I fell in love with the 12c back in the 80’s. ![]() They violate one of those universal laws of marketing by creating products that their customers don’t want. What happens when companies push too far with product development that favors the new over the old? The results aren’t always positive, I am afraid. A newer version, the HP 12c Platinum, was introduced a few years ago, but most HP 12c users rejected it: it was not built the same way and had a few changes the HP 12c users didn’t like! The HP 12c is a consumer electronics product that today is still sold with the original model name, and has not changed its design since its introduction. ![]() in numerical analysis, and was put in charge of creating a financial calculator that would fit in a shirt pocket, be reliable and have a long battery life. That former farmer boy was Dennis Harms, who joined HP fresh from Iowa State with a Ph.D. The HP-12C is HP’s longest and best-selling product, in continual production since its introduction in 1981. I’m talking about a pocket sized device that revolutionized the way financial calculations were made - the HP 12c Financial Calculator. I’m not talking about that famous IBM PC that was born the same year, now only a museum piece. Thirty-five years ago, a former Iowa farm boy led a team that produced probably the most successful product of the time, one that, thirty-five years later, it is still selling in its original form and is used by over 100 million people worldwide. HP 12c, Thirty Five Years and Still Going Strong
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