Putting New Shoes on an Old War Horse
HP's 12C calculator has been around since 1981. It's still a good tool, and now it's even better
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Hewlett-Packard is about to introduce a new version of the HP 12C Financial Calculator. This seemingly mundane fact is actually remarkable, because the original version has been on the market, essentially unchanged, since 1981, the year the IBM PC was first introduced. What accounts for such amazing longevity in an industry where product lifetimes are typically measured in months?
The answer is that it does one job both inexpensively and exceptionally well. And that helps explain the persistence of devices whose roles might long ago have been taken over by the PC.