By the end of the 'seventies, the 'wild west' atmosphere of the early days of personal computing was beginning to dissipate and established companies were getting into the act. Among the most influential of these was Hewlett-Packard, a company with its roots deep in the electronics business and a strong track record of innovation.

Since the 'sixties, HP had been known for their expertise in the electronic calculator field, their innovations including the first desktop scientific calculator as well as the first pocket scientific calculator. There was also a strong mini-computer division with an enviable reputation for innovation at the lower end of the corporate market.

With such a pedigree, it was perhaps unsurprising that HP decided to enter the microcomputer world with what was essentially a superb desktop calculator. Constructed with the attention to detail and high quality that was the Hewlett-Packard hallmark, the HP-85 was the sort of product which one just wanted, even if one would have to think very hard for a reason to spend over three thousand dollars to get it.

A substantial chassis supported a completely integrated machine with keyboard, miniature VDU, tape drive and printer. The motherboard was built around an 8-bit proprietary processor with extended BASIC in 32KB of ROM the machine was powerful enough for most purposes although the standard 16KB of RAM seemed a little miserly on a machine that sold right at the top end of the market.

The calculator heritage was clearly shown by the machine's use of BCD (binary coded decimal) for calculations and the huge (for the time) 12 digit precision with exponents up to +/- 499. For the 'seventies, this was real computing power.

There was a comprehensive library of technical and scientific software available on tape and ROM cartridges. Most importantly of all, the HP-85 could be interfaced to the GPIB bus that HP's instrumentation used, making it possible to log results from tests and experiments straight into user programmes.

Despite what was, at the time, a technical tour-de-force, the HP-85's main selling point was the machine's appearance. Hewlett-Packard had always invested in high quality design and the HP-85 was, from the first, an iconic design. Even today, a HP-85 would not look out of place on any desk or lab bench and there are still users who find the machine's blend of features more attractive than those of any subsequent design, leading to a lively market in secondhand machines and accessories.

What the HP-85 was not, though, was a general purpose computer in the mold of the Apple II or the Commodore PET. People did write games for it, but there wasn't that much you could do with 16K of RAM and a screen that displayed 16 lines of 32 characters. Something else that wasn't really practical was word processing although plenty of people did just that, even if they had to write their own programmes to do it.

The HP-85 remained on the market for five years, an eternity in those days of non-stop innovation when the average life of any given model was measured in months and single digit numbers at that. Eventually, the HP-85 fell before the inexorable rise of the IBM-PC and the Apple Macintosh. If pressure from the corporate IT department didn't get it, the glitzy graphics of Apple's wonder machine did.

I never owned a HP-85. Much as I wanted one, it was far out of my reach at that time. However, I did work at a site where there was, not one but half a dozen in use. As a result, I got a chance to try out its capabilities and it did not disappoint.

The BASIC interpreter was a little odd to anyone who was more familiar with the Apple or Microsoft varieties but very logical apart from that. The keyboard was amazing, I'd only ever come across that sort of quality on the 1978 Pertec PCC-2000 a very high end machine even by comparison with the HP-85. The built in printer was slightly less appealing, limited as it was to a narrow strip of thermal paper but the tape drive was a revelation, being very nearly as fast as an eight inch floppy.

HP-85s are still traded and there's even a company in the U.S. that refurbishes them to factory standards. Despite selling the rebuilt units at around $1000, there seems to be a steady demand. Of course, a new hand-held graphic calculator has much more raw processing power at 10% of the price, but it just won't be quite so much fun.