Wall Street’s cult calculator, the HP 12c financial calculator, turns 30 years old:
Sales of the device, which debuted in 1981, haven’t slipped even after its manufacturer, Hewlett-Packard Co., introduced more-advanced devices or even, two years ago, a 12c iPhone application, which replicates all the calculator’s functions, the company says.
“Once you learned it on the 12c, there was no need to change,” says David Carter, chief investment officer of New York wealth-management firm Lenox Advisors, who has owned his 12c for 22 years and still keeps it on his desk. “It’s not like the math was changing.”
Thirty years after the launch of the 12c, it’s still commonplace for financial analysts filing into a conference room to set down their calculators next to their papers and cellphones.Indeed, the 12c, which costs $70 on H-P’s website, is H-P’s best-selling calculator of all time, though the company won’t reveal how many units it has sold over the years. (A standard calculator costs about $10.) Its chief competitor is Texas Instruments’ $28 BA II Plus, which is the only other calculator test-takers are permitted to use on the official CFA exam.
The 12c is slim, black and gold, and rectangular, just over five inches wide by three inches high. It runs on an unconventional operating system called “Reverse Polish Notation,” which eschews parentheses and equal signs in an effort to run long calculations more efficiently.
That may be one reason users are reluctant to switch. “I’ve become so addicted to it that I am unable to use the iPhone calculator correctly,” says John Lynch, chief equity strategist at Wells Fargo Funds Management Group in Charlotte, N.C.
It’s also built like a tank:
To test the 12c’s durability, engineers practiced dropping it onto concrete floors, says Dennis Harms, who led the original 12c design team and still works at H-P. “I’ve heard stories of them surviving snowblowers,” he says.
I own two of them. One I bought at the beginning of undergrad in 1988, which still works great and sits on my desk at home, and another I bought for my desk at work.
Never would have gotten through bond valuation work without it.
I love watching the face of someone who asks to borrow it when they are searching for the “equals” key.
HP’s engineering calculators were equally good for not-lending. “You can borrow it, but I don’t think you’ll be able to use it…”
Anyway, there’s a lot to be said for a tool that does one job very well and can handle a bit of abuse without breaking.