George , I do not normally respond on this board but the article
you referenced amused me enough to drop some copy regarding the evolution of another product that is widely used today.
The content may have merits in ones assesment when IP telephony is discussed. The product mentioned was forwarded
by engineers at the bequest of William Hewlett.(of Hewlett Packard )Seems the
imaginative mind of William Hewlett and comsumer demand for
a hand held calculator won out ! Now is Frank Peters(of FTEL)
as imaginative as William Hewlett ? I believe so ! Will
comsumers ultilize a cost effective solution for their
telephony needs ? I believe so !
Back to Lurking , Hal Weglarz
>Introduced on February 1 1972, the HP-35 was the first handheld electronic calculator sold by HP, and the first handheld ever
to perform logarithmic and trigonometric functions with one keystroke. In effect it was the world's first electronic slide rule. As
opposed to later HP calculators, it has an x^y function, not y^x, and the trigonometric functions work in degrees only. It does
not have a shift key like later models, but there is an ARC key for use with SIN, COS, and TAN to give their inverses. The
story goes that it was made after William Hewlett was shown the HP9100 desktop calculator by his engineers, and asked for a
version to fit in his shirt-pocket. At first, HP thought they would only make a few HP-35s for their own engineers, as no-one
else would be interested. Then they decided to try selling it - and sold hundreds of thousands. <
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