From talking to him, it’s clear that this is a genuine labour of love, not a clumsy attempt at profiteering from HP’s long-since forgotten calculator heritage.Īt the table, Michael starts to put together my 12C. He clearly loves every step of the process: finding the parts, sourcing fixes for manufacturing issues, getting the PCB design right and making sure that the durability is up to scratch.
Ultimately, he’s happy to have made the project work at all. “From talking to him, it’s clear that this is a genuine labour of love.”īased on my experience of the copyright and trademark business, I would want the strongest proof possible – large corporates aren’t famous for sticking to their promises in matters such as this. As a result, there have been some official responses from HP regarding his project, though not in a way that sounds like the final word to me. Michael related a story concerning one HP employee (and SwissMicros customer) who, despite not being in the legal and intellectual property department, was prepared to go and sound them out. We talked for a while about HP’s reaction to SwissMicros. “Can I copy something you made 30 years ago?” Michael sells more of these than he does the 12C financial variant these days, and includes HP staff members in his list of customers. Back in the day, the 41 was the PDA for the absolute gurus in every field, being much more a general-purpose compute device than merely a simple calculator. The 41C emulator, packed into the same petite ARM-based hardware as the others, is his tour de force. Not that the finance marketplace is currently doing a huge amount of business with Michael: he was much more enthusiastic about the engineering and science versions of the platform. According to Michael, one key attraction for this interest group is that they can keep talking on their phone while making the calculations. While Michael’s calculators can’t match the sensation of using an original 12C, the theatre of being a financial adviser or corporate money man is massively enhanced by being able to twirl a little, mysterious box in your hand that spits out the payments on a loan given the amount, years and rate– or the amount you can borrow given your maximum monthly payment – with nothing more than a few prods at the keys. It’s something that’s sadly missing from modern computing, almost everything reduced to the same tactile experience of a finger pressed on cold glass. Car manufacturers exert huge effort in creating and designing “feel” – how a button sounds when it clicks, the percussive thunk of a firmly-closed door.
Outside the realms of computing and IT, the tactile charm of a physical device is used to sell all sorts of products. “Car manufacturers exert huge effort in creating and designing “feel” – how a button sounds when it clicks, the percussive thunk of a firmly-closed door.” His reincarnation of the world’s most expensive and exclusive consumer single-purpose computing device retains its own haptic charm, and weaves its own unique spell. His is not a complete and exact physical replica, but that doesn’t matter one bit. What really fascinated him was that strange physical presence the original HP calculators had, the way their features and physical feel conspired to make them an engine of calculation and a badge of rank at the same time.
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Those loan agreement papers I saw back then were absolutely predicated on HP’s code giving the same answers – bugs and all – for the foreseeable future. After all, little is going to change in the software, which wasn’t especially fast-changing in the early 1980s, and can’t be allowed to vary much these days either. Michael is devoted to much the same topic. That man’s contribution to Dell’s products was how people feel about something they touch. He could talk at length about what made something tacky (matte metal) or “blingy” (the same moulding coated with a layer of chrome).
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Where all the other little rooms and topics at the exhibition relied heavily on PowerPoint and projectors, this designer had boxes full of all the final samples of case and face designs for all manner of Dell products. I was instantly transported back to another presentation, years in the past, from one of the senior product designers at Dell.
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