It was the summertime and everybody was trying to get their hands on this hot new gadget. People were waiting in long lines and selling their possessions in order to raise the money to get this device. Was it the newest iPod or the iPhone? Nope - but there is a connection to Apple. Was it the cool, but useless, USB Mini Fridge? Absolutely not. The year was 1972 and everybody had to have the HP-35 - the world’s first scientific calculator.

Since the public sees them as relegated to the desktop printer space people tend to forget the rich history that Hewlett-Packard has. They were in Silicon Valley before it was called Silicon Valley. They were there before Google, before Cisco, before Sun, before Intel and even before Fairchild Semiconductor. The decision to go ahead with the HP-35 project was one of the best decisions of Bill Hewlett’s tenure at the company. All of the marketing studies indicated that there was no demand for this project but Hewlett charged ahead because, being an actual engineer, he thought he couldn’t live without one of these devices and he thought other engineers would feel the same way.

History proved Hewlett correct and all of the marketing studies incorrect. Orders in the first month exceeded what was originally estimated as the entire market size. Existing calculators could only calculator four mathematical operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. This new HP-35 could perform trigonometric and exponential functions which made the slide rule obsolete. How many of us even know how to use a slide rule? I don’t see very many hands going up.

So why is this coming up now and what is the connection to Apple? Without much fanfare HP “re-released” the HP-35 this last summer to celebrate its 35th anniversary. Thanks to Moore’s law the price for this gadget has gone down from $395 in 1972 to $59.99 in 2007. The steady advance of technology beats the cost of inflation hands down. As far as the connection to Apple - Steve Wozniak spent a short time working at HP’s Advanced Products Division. After being shown no interest from HP management for his idea of a personal computer he decided to strike out with Steve Jobs to form their company. They needed capital for their new enterprise so Steve W. decided to sell his prized posession: his HP-35.

More resources:
Wikipedia entry for the HP-35.
HP’s 2007 release of the HP-35.
HP Museum entry for the HP-35

Black Hat 2007 has come and gone but ZDNet covers a highlight and sends a great warning.

Hamster plus Hotspot equals Web 2.0 meltdown! by ZDNet’s George Ou — Robert Graham (CEO Errata Security) gave his Web 2.0 hijacking presentation to a packed audience at Black Hat 2007 today. The audience erupted with applause and laughter when Graham used his tools to hijack someone’s Gmail account during an unscripted demo. The victim in this case was using a typical unprotected Wi-Fi Hotspot […]

We generally frown on using the phrase “Web 2.0″ around here but if we must pick out our favorite Web 2.0 app it wouldn’t be flickr, twitter or myspace (least favorite). The winner, hands down, is Nike+. In typical Web 2.0 fashion the users supply the content and interact in a type of social network where people are there for a specific reason: to track their running, or walking, and monitor their progress towards specific or open ended goals. Users can participate in challenges where they compete in competitions for the most miles or the fastest specified distance.

To find out details of Nike+ visit Wikipedia. In a nutshell you need an iPod Nano, a pair of Nike+ shoes and the Nike+ iPod Sports kit. It is a powerful combination that has the traditional Apple ease of use and slick presentation layer coupled with Nike’s seemingly ubiquitous athletic wear. The front end is completely flash based and easily allows you to navigate between your daily runs and any challenges you are involved in. It is so popular around here that it is used by almost everybody at SitesNow. Here are a couple of screenshots of the Nike+ website for one of our employees:

This first image tracks your overall progress since you have been using Nike+:

This second image details out a daily run including your time, total distance and overall pace.