The Hewlett-Packard 9100A (HP 9100A) is an early programmable calculator[3] (or computer), first appearing in 1968. HP called it a desktop calculator because, as Bill Hewlett said, "If we had called it a computer, it would have been rejected by our customers' computer gurus because it didn't look like an IBM. We therefore decided to call it a calculator, and all such nonsense disappeared."[1]
An ad for the 9100A in 1968 Science magazine contains one of the earliest documented use (as of 2000) of the phrase personal computer.[2]
History
The unit was descended from a prototype produced by engineer Thomas "Tom" E. Osborne, who joined the company when HP decided to adopt the project.[4][5][6]
Thanks to its high speed of operations which was an order of magnitude faster than competitors[8] – addition or subtraction took just 2 ms, multiplication 22 ms and division 27 ms – the device could quickly execute not just regular trigonometric functions (330 ms) or logarithms (130 ms) but many iterative computations when following a program.[9] This made the 9100A the first scientific calculator by the modern definition, and also marked the beginning of Hewlett-Packard's long history of using Reverse Polish notation (RPN) entry on their calculators.
Due to the similarities of the machines, Hewlett-Packard was ordered to pay about $900,000 in royalties to Olivetti after copying some of the features adopted in the Programma 101, like the magnetic card and the architecture.[10][11]
^"Olivetti Programma P101/P102". Old Computers. Archived from the original on 2016-06-09. Retrieved 2010-08-11. The P101, and particularly the magnetic card, was covered by a US patent (3,495,222, Perotto et al.) and this gave to Olivetti over $900.000 in royalties by HP alone, for the re-use of this technology in the HP9100 series.