HP did license out the manufacture of 12cs at some point so if it's not a counterfeit it is almost certainly a manufacturing error by some licensee. Note that the 12-c is one of a legendary "voyager" series of HP calculators which have that landscape form factor and are highly prized by collectors. There is an HP15-C scientific calculator equivalent and a 16-C which is supposed to be for programmers so does the sorts of things we programmers do all the time like converting things from hex to octal etc. It has built-in support for bit twiddling and shifting operations too. If you ever see a landscape-style "voyager" HP calculator in a junk shop or whatever and it's not a 12-C (because they are quite common) it's quite rare and may be worth buying and reselling if it's in usable condition.
I have 2 HP-12c calculators which I bought while I worked at Goldman. One was always on my desk at work and I had another at home. I can certainly confirm they were common in finance back in 2000-2009ish. That said even back then they were being replaced by non-RPN calculators for a lot of people and only people with nostalgia and the hardcore had a 12c.
They're incredibly robust - famously a zookeeper once used an HP12-c to calculate proportions for animal feed, dropped it into the mix and it passed through the digestive tract of a hippo. It was still able to calculate the yield to maturity of a bond after cleaning.
In addition their batteries last forever. Even though the versions I have use the "weak" newer battery tech[1] they are both still on their original batteries and as I say mine are about 20 years old and at one point I used one of them every day. Having a slow cpu means they just run forever.
I now additionally own two other RPN calculators which I bought because I needed a scientific calculator and have a nostalgia for HP calculators because I used to write little programs for my dad on his. The 12c and the like don't have trig functions in particular so I own an HP35s and a swissmicros DM42[2], which is essentially an HP42S emulator with a faster processor and some enhanced capabilities based on Thomas Okken's "Free42"[3]. I would strongly recommend the DM42 for anyone who likes HP-style RPN calculators and wants a more powerful version. It's a fabulous calculator. Pretty much the only way the HPs are better is the feel of the keys which is too stiff on the DM42.
The HP35s is a great calculator also. Not as powerful as the DM42 but with that lovely classic HP key feel and a bit more usability for some things at the expense of being much worse to program, much slower and only having a 2-line screen. It does have a nice built-in set of physical constants though (which I never use).
[1] The original battery tech uses some sort of legendary toxic battery that is no longer permitted due to hazardous chemical regulations.
The original battery tech uses some sort of legendary toxic battery that is no longer permitted due to hazardous chemical regulations.
Alkaline button batteries used to contain mercury, which has been phased out in the last 20-25 years. The original Voyager line used 3 x LR44 (alkaline), but even then you could have replaced them with their less toxic silver-oxide equivalents. Today's LR44 cells are mercury-free.
Later iterations of HP12C use 2 x CR2032, not because of any concerns about toxicity -- the 2032s were equally toxic -- but, I suspect, because the original battery controller was all custom HP silicon in some funky semi-analog process, which couldn't survive when HP, along with the rest of the industry, fully succumbed to cost-cutting disease. Everything possible in the new calculators if off-the-shelf.
The original Voyager line used silicon-on-sapphire chips, which are extremely energy efficient. My 1987 vintage HP-15C is only on its third set of batteries. When they changed to a conventional CMOS process and emulated the original CPU on top of an ARM microcontroller the power drain went up.
I still use my two vintage 15Cs for simple calculations on a regular basis, and change the batteries every decade or so.
To be fair, lack of self-discharge in the battery chemistry has a lot to do with the long battery life; you can actually drain the batteries fairly quickly with long-running calculations.
I've had other HPs (28C, 48SX, 48GX, 33S, 35S, 49G, 50G, Prime) but the 15C is the one I keep returning to, as anything more powerful really should be handled on a computer CAS like Mathics or Matlab-like environment like Octave instead.
All those cells have a zinc anode, which used to be amalgamated with a small amount of mercury to prevent corrosion and leakage[1]. (Mercuric oxide batteries certainly contain even more.)
Comments
HP did license out the manufacture of 12cs at some point so if it's not a counterfeit it is almost certainly a manufacturing error by some licensee. Note that the 12-c is one of a legendary "voyager" series of HP calculators which have that landscape form factor and are highly prized by collectors. There is an HP15-C scientific calculator equivalent and a 16-C which is supposed to be for programmers so does the sorts of things we programmers do all the time like converting things from hex to octal etc. It has built-in support for bit twiddling and shifting operations too. If you ever see a landscape-style "voyager" HP calculator in a junk shop or whatever and it's not a 12-C (because they are quite common) it's quite rare and may be worth buying and reselling if it's in usable condition.
I have 2 HP-12c calculators which I bought while I worked at Goldman. One was always on my desk at work and I had another at home. I can certainly confirm they were common in finance back in 2000-2009ish. That said even back then they were being replaced by non-RPN calculators for a lot of people and only people with nostalgia and the hardcore had a 12c.
They're incredibly robust - famously a zookeeper once used an HP12-c to calculate proportions for animal feed, dropped it into the mix and it passed through the digestive tract of a hippo. It was still able to calculate the yield to maturity of a bond after cleaning.
In addition their batteries last forever. Even though the versions I have use the "weak" newer battery tech[1] they are both still on their original batteries and as I say mine are about 20 years old and at one point I used one of them every day. Having a slow cpu means they just run forever.
I now additionally own two other RPN calculators which I bought because I needed a scientific calculator and have a nostalgia for HP calculators because I used to write little programs for my dad on his. The 12c and the like don't have trig functions in particular so I own an HP35s and a swissmicros DM42[2], which is essentially an HP42S emulator with a faster processor and some enhanced capabilities based on Thomas Okken's "Free42"[3]. I would strongly recommend the DM42 for anyone who likes HP-style RPN calculators and wants a more powerful version. It's a fabulous calculator. Pretty much the only way the HPs are better is the feel of the keys which is too stiff on the DM42.
The HP35s is a great calculator also. Not as powerful as the DM42 but with that lovely classic HP key feel and a bit more usability for some things at the expense of being much worse to program, much slower and only having a 2-line screen. It does have a nice built-in set of physical constants though (which I never use).
[1] The original battery tech uses some sort of legendary toxic battery that is no longer permitted due to hazardous chemical regulations.
[2] https://www.swissmicros.com/product/dm42
[3] https://thomasokken.com/free42/
The original battery tech uses some sort of legendary toxic battery that is no longer permitted due to hazardous chemical regulations.
Alkaline button batteries used to contain mercury, which has been phased out in the last 20-25 years. The original Voyager line used 3 x LR44 (alkaline), but even then you could have replaced them with their less toxic silver-oxide equivalents. Today's LR44 cells are mercury-free.
Later iterations of HP12C use 2 x CR2032, not because of any concerns about toxicity -- the 2032s were equally toxic -- but, I suspect, because the original battery controller was all custom HP silicon in some funky semi-analog process, which couldn't survive when HP, along with the rest of the industry, fully succumbed to cost-cutting disease. Everything possible in the new calculators if off-the-shelf.
The original Voyager line used silicon-on-sapphire chips, which are extremely energy efficient. My 1987 vintage HP-15C is only on its third set of batteries. When they changed to a conventional CMOS process and emulated the original CPU on top of an ARM microcontroller the power drain went up.
I still use my two vintage 15Cs for simple calculations on a regular basis, and change the batteries every decade or so.
To be fair, lack of self-discharge in the battery chemistry has a lot to do with the long battery life; you can actually drain the batteries fairly quickly with long-running calculations.
I've had other HPs (28C, 48SX, 48GX, 33S, 35S, 49G, 50G, Prime) but the 15C is the one I keep returning to, as anything more powerful really should be handled on a computer CAS like Mathics or Matlab-like environment like Octave instead.
LR and CR cells don't contain mercury and never have. The original 12c battery was a MR44. 'L' is manganese alkaline, 'C' is lithium, 'M' is mercury.
All those cells have a zinc anode, which used to be amalgamated with a small amount of mercury to prevent corrosion and leakage[1]. (Mercuric oxide batteries certainly contain even more.)
[1] https://www.epa.gov/mercury/mercury-batteries