[Nifster]

Yup. I remember when we were allocated money to get an HP 9820 desktop calculator. Had 4K ram. We were thrilled. We could write very short programs and do things that would have taken weeks in the que for the big computers to do

[Hootowl99]

I also used a Hewlett-Packard 9820 back in the day. A real work horse. It was originally the brains for a HP GC/MS system in the lab then retired when HP came out with the 9845. Virtually all the 9820s were bundled with high end lab analyzers.

All told, the company invested about $20k in the total desktop package. The 9820 itself, thermal paper printer, x-y plotter and 5.25 floppy disk drive. Programs we wrote ourselves to handle pilot plant raw data, statistics and modeling. That HP Basic was a real sweet language that eliminated a lot of lines of code compared to using FORTRAN.