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#11. Full Frontal Nerdity

Jan 27
3 min read

Behold, the glorious HP25C calculator. It was mine, once. Isn’t it beautiful?

When I bought it in the winter of 1975, it listed for $195. That would be over $1,300 today. To put it in perspective, my tuition at the University of Massachusetts for the 1974-1975 school year was $300.

I couldn’t afford a two hundred dollar calculator. But a nice guy down the hall, a savvy senior and business major named Dave, said he could get it for me at cost. A bit of a nerd himself, Dave understood me, and how much I wanted that calculator. I’d saved some money working over the winter break, Dave delivered, and I bought the calculator for $115.

As an aside, Dave’s kindness to me meant a lot. He was the top-ranked student at the UMass business school. Our university didn’t have the best academic reputation, but knowing that someone as brilliant as he chose to come to the state university made me feel good about the place. My family couldn’t afford to send me to a fancy private college, which, at first, I believed I’d have preferred. But in retrospect, I couldn’t have had a better college experience anywhere else. Dave—full name David G. Fubini—went on to manage the Boston office of a famous consulting firm, and later joined the Harvard Business School faculty where he is a Senior Lecturer in Business Administration.

Back to my awesome new HP25C.

I really did need a calculator, and probably could have gotten all the power I required for ten bucks. But here’s the thing: This HP model was programmable! You could punch in up to forty-nine lines of “code” in a very basic programming language, allowing you to perform multistep tasks repeatedly.

I knew the device would be great for tallying data points for statistical analyses. Or if I needed to calculate the areas for a bunch of circles—and who isn’t confronted with this situation from time to time?—I could simply enter the program steps, type in a radius, run the program, and repeat for each circle. No worries about making a mistake in one of the several steps toward the solution. With forty-nine lines to work with and a little forethought, one could actually do some fairly sophisticated stuff. Again, I could have used a cheaper calculator and done a little extra handwork. But that was hardly the point.

Little did I know that the HP25C would go on to serve a greater purpose.

Now, a half-century later, I can look back and see the unintended consequence of my nerding out on that pocket-sized chunk-o’-tech: It enhanced my appreciation for the logic of computer programming. It got me writing code just for fun. And along with honing my coding skills, I was learning to think abstractly about complex problems and how to break them down into smaller, bite-sized chunks.

Programming turned out to be incredibly useful a couple of years later, when I needed to perform data transformations and other tasks for my honors thesis project. And I continued to play with programming in grad school, using it, for example, to have computers present interactive instructions to subjects in experiments.

In my first job at the University of Iowa, I wrote a program to cable together a half-dozen PCs in our lab via their printer ports, creating a purpose-built “Local Area Network.” That let me record information-sharing among subjects and configure the PCs into virtual networks of varying shapes. With this setup, I tested theories of how and where power emerges in different kinds of social exchange networks. Later, I wrote another program to acquire, compile, and visualize physiological data in real time. I used it to test ideas about stress responses in ongoing social interactions.

These early projects led to publications that helped build a career which vastly exceeded my expectations. But the truth is, I never cared about having a big career. I just wanted to ensure I had a job where I could keep doing fun and interesting projects and share them through publications.

I’d be exaggerating if I said it all started with the HP-25C. But that cute little device taught me a lot of things that I never would have anticipated learning. It helped me to explore hidden social mechanisms that can both bond and divide us.

It definitely paid for itself.

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2 Comments

Wendy

Jan 28

I remember you having that calculator! I think you should track down this David G. Fubini and share this post with him. 😊

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Guest

Jan 27

Being a fellow nerd I can appreciate this viewpoint... Rich E

Edited

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