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Rode and Hewlett-Packard colleagues, with the HP-80 on the desk.
Personal collection.
POCKET CALCULATOR
Rode was the lead engineer on the team
that invented the first scientific pocket cal-
culator, the HP-35, which had arithmetic,
logarithmic, and trigonometric functions.
Hewlett-Packard, the company he worked for,
had already developed a desktop computer
when William Redington Hewlett came up
with the idea to create a computer that wou-
ld fit in his shirt pocket. Development took a
year and sales exceeded all expectations. US
President Richard Nixon took one with him
on his first visit to China as an example of the
At the declaration of the HP-35 as an IEEE Milestone Event in 2009.
Personal collection.
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latest American technological achievement.
Soon after, astronauts took one to space, reco-
gnition of what a useful instrument it was.