Rubber feet on the bottom mean that it resists sliding around your desk. To my fingers, they are not particularly ergonomic or quick to use, but I'm far from expert with it, and presumably you get used to it. The keys require a fair amount of force, and have a distinctive trapezoid shape with sloped front faces. It's surprisingly light weight, but feels sturdy. (Apparently the 12c is so unchanged after more than three decades that it's still running much the same arithmetical code that Harms wrote for it.) In the Hand He initially was involved in writing the software code for doing calculations, and then was promoted to project manager for the 12c effort. The project manager was a man named Dennis Harms, who had a recently acquired PhD in numerical analysis when he joined HP. There's a good chance the case design and graphics were done entirely by an engineer. I haven't been able to find any information on the designer of the 12c, and at that point in HP's history there may not have been a distinct design role. This also shows the evolution of our gadget culture - today all products are "consumer" looking, but in 1981 a high-end calculator was seen as more of a tool than a desirable consumer product, and so was styled and built accordingly, with an emphasis on rugged functionality. Compare it next to Sony Walkmans of the time, for example, which were much more high-tech looking (in an eighties kind of way), even though they were really just analog/mechanical cassette players and not state-of-the art computing devices. Its utilitarian styling and gold-tone brushed metal panel would have looked more at home in a Radio Shack or Heathkit catalog from the 60's. When it came out in 1981 (same year as the IBM PC), the HP12c would have looked rather old-fashioned even for that time. The 12c was the first calculator by HP to employ RPN, and a few others adopted it since. In addition to reducing the number of keystrokes in some situations, other benefits cited by fans of RPN are that it doesn't require thinking about order of operations when doing longer calculations (eg multiplying happens before adding, or putting parts of the calculation in parentheses in order to force a specific order), and reversing of mistakes doesn't require starting over. For a simple comparison, here's how to multiply 4.3 by 2.7: The feature which makes it both beloved and at first confounding is its use of Reverse Polish Notation, or RPN. Even at that price it was an instant success. But when it was launched on September 1, 1981, it retailed for $150 (equivalent to over $400 today). Today the 12c can be bought for under $50.
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