Over on eBay, there are not one, but two utterly gorgeous HP-01 Hewlett Packard LED calculator wrist watches up for auction. Even at $1,500, it’s just brutally hard not to pluck a kidney from the navel and hit the black market in order to own one. These herald back from a different era, when the fashion accessories of today’s most hopeless geeks were the leathery, tobacco-scented wrist accoutrements of the opulent lounge lizard god.
If you can afford one, go buy it. They even come with a case and manual in good nick, though it certainly looks like the manual has been used to swab up a bus station floor or two.
Update: Literally within the course of writing this post, that last HP-01 was plucked from out of our hands… the reserve price has been met, the auction is over. I can’t justify not posting this, though. Some commenter will write about their first HP-01, someone will respond with a loving reverie to their first calculator watch… and even if not, this post will stand as testament to how beautiful even the most obsolete gadget can be. It’s still a post worth spitting up.
I loved my 15 dollar Armitron data bank watch.
I know I know, more zeros, but still.
a loving reverie to my first calculator watch.
Never fear: LED digital watches (tho not the calculator variety) are being made again!
My mom wouldn’t buy one for me, and I resented all of the cheaters in math class who had one.
Here is an ad HP ran for this watch when it first came out. It was actually quite advanced, allowing you to use the time and stopwatch vales as variables in equations.
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/06/14/worlds-first-calculator-watch-the-hp-01/
Did the pinky fingernail that you’d whittled into an integral coke spoon back in your lounge-lizard days double as a stylus for this thing? If it hasn’t been cleaned properly, you may be able to scrape enough powder off a vintage watch to get a mini gum-rush.