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 entry into
computers. 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. With this in mind, HP built the
HP 9100 desktop scientific calculator. 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. This new calculator 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 using the size of his shirt pocket as a guide. The result was the
HP-35 calculator. This calculator provided functionality that was revolutionary for a pocket calculator at that time. 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. On 1 November 2021, Moravia Consulting spol. s r.o. (for all markets but the Americas) and
Royal Consumer Information Products, Inc. (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. == Characteristics ==