Terminated: 1989
What I find really amazing about this calculator series is the design, which is actually quite timeless and very elegant. If one calculator series deserves a design award it’s this series. Only HEWLETT PACKARD can create heavy duty casing with such elegance.
The calculators in this series are:
- HP 10C
- HP 11C
- HP 12C
- HP 12c Platinum
- HP 12c Platinum 25th Anniversary Edition
- HP 12C Platinum 30th Anniversary Edition
- HP 12c Prestige
- HP 15C (this one)
- HP 15C Limited Edition
- HP 15C Collector’s Edition
- HP 16C
It also has more memory than its predecessor. More than 300 program steps available standard, and more in exchange of data registers.
Programs and data are stored in constant memory and are not lost when the calculator is switched off.
I bought this calculator second-hand. Although this calculator is officially terminated, it was still possible to find it sold as "new" in some shops in 1999 (the last time I saw one was in a shop that sells camera’s and such but I don’t remember where that was. It was somewhere in the Netherlands and it was quite expensive as well. I believe it was in Veldhoven but again, I’m not exactly sure. I’ve also seen them on a visit to San Francisco in 1997, there were a couple of shops selling all kinds of calculators in China Town. I don’t know whether the calculators sold there are really as new as advertised but at least they look new and include original packaging and manuals).
For more information on this beauty please refer to the better sources, like The Museum of HP Calculators (link validated 2024-01-13).
An excellent overview by Eric Smith of al the hardware changes over time in this Voyager series can be found here on his website (link validated 2024-08-11)m cached version here (just in case his server catches fire again).