Terry smiles childishly and holds up a calculator with the word BOOBIES in numerical form. Ray is not pleased.

February 1, 1972

The world's first scientific calculator debuts. Made by Hewlett-Packard, the HP-35 is the first pocket-sized electronic device capable of performing advanced trigonometric and exponential functions.


As the story goes, HP co-founder Bill Hewlett threw down the gauntlet to his engineering team: make an HP-9100A that can fit in a shirt pocket.

September 13
The last straw.
Want more clothing-based historical events? Check out the Straw Hat Riot.

The HP-9100A was a desktop calculator that HP dropped a few years earlier in 1968 - - and it was a beast. It was the first ever scientific calculator that could do it all; trigonometric, logirithmic, and exponential functions. (It was so advanced that it was technically a computer, but the marketing team nixed branding it like one.)

Fitting all that computing power into a compact size took Hewlett's A-team roughly two years to crack. But by early 1972 the engineers solved the puzzle and HP premiered the now famous HP-35.

And yeah, it's said that the final dimensions were actually taken from Bill Hewlett's shirt pocket.

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