HP 12C - 31 Years

Iconicism is everywhere it seems, but if you've gone to business school in the last couple of decades, you'll be familiar with this tool of the MBA crowd, which truly deserves to be called iconic.  It's the HP 12C, Hewlett Packard's financial calculator that, among other things, uses Reverse Polish Notation for number entry.  (With RPN you enter A, B, + instead of A+B.)  Once you get used to RPN, all other pocket calculators seem faintly ridiculous.  Need to know how many days between September 13, 2012 and November 10, 2012 (the date of the WSSCA Hunt test)?  You've got 58 days to get your dog ready.

The HP 12C is virtually unchanged, at least on the outside, over the last 3 decades!  According to an AJC article pubished in 2004, the HP 12C is the oldest consumer electronics item still made.  Long ago, geekism might have been a slide rule hanging from your belt.  A pocket protector is still a good tell.  But modern geekism, thy name is HP 12C.