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: The HP 15C is the very enhanced brother of the HP 11C. It has such advanced enhancements as complex number maths "(i)", and matrix operations.
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 valid 2024-01-13).