HP calculators

The corporation recognized two opportunities: it might be possible to automate the instrumentation that HP was producing, and HP's customer base were likely to buy a product that could replace the slide rules and adding machines that were being used for computation.

This was a full-featured calculator that included not only standard "adding machine" functions but also powerful capabilities to handle floating-point numbers, trigonometric functions, logarithms, exponentiation, and square roots.

He charged his engineers with this exact goal using the size of his shirt pocket as a guide.

Some of them could be used (via HP-IL) to control the instruments other Hewlett Packard divisions produced.

[1] (for all markets but the Americas) and Royal Consumer Information Products, Inc.[2] (for the Americas) became the licensees of HP Development Company, L.P. to continue the development, production, distribution, marketing and support of any HP-branded calculators.