Hewlett-Packard Advert - March 1981
From Practical Computing
Discover the full professional power of Hewlett-Packard's personal computer
Hewlett-Packard, which like Commodore, TI and Tandy also had a line in calculators, had launched its HP-85 micro at the beginning of 1980, with the machine even originating from the calculator side of the business.
Codenamed "Capricorn" when it was still a company secret, it was aimed at the scientific market and was sold as a complete system including screen, keyboard, thermal printer and a magnetic tape unit with what seems an implausibly-small 217K storage per cartridge - even floppies could do more than that.
According to oldcomputers.net, the HP-85 ran a custom 0.613MHz 8-bit CPU[1], which was slow even in the 1970s.
It retailed for £1,950, or around £12,300 in 2025, a price which Personal Computer World thought was too much in two reviews: "in the final analysis, the machine is overprice for the hardware content"[2], or "£1,200 would be more like it"[3].
At the time, Commodore's PET was around a third the price.
Date created: 01 July 2012
Last updated: 04 April 2025
Sources
Text and otherwise-uncredited photos © nosher.net 2025. Dollar/GBP conversions, where used, assume $1.50 to £1. "Now" prices are calculated dynamically using average RPI per year.
