Thank you to Renato for bringing this discussion to my attention. As I said briefly in my Ebay listing, when HP stopped making the 15C, they pulled them out of stores and gave them free to their employees. My father was one of those employees. At the time, they gave him 3 or 4 15Cs and he gave most of them away to friends and family as gifts. He also had 1 or 2 15Cs that he used himself. He nor I never had any reason to "repackage" it. In fact, I just found this one 2 weeks ago while cleaning up the house and I was going to give it away as well...that was until I saw what they were going for on Ebay, so I decided to sell it. I am as amazed as you are that someone was willing to pay so much for an old calculator, but it is definately authentic. Nobody in my family (including me) had any idea of its value...we probably would have eventaully given it away, thrown it away, or sold it at a garage sale for $5. It is just an old calculator taking up space to us.
I do have some more pictures if any of you would like me to email them to you. I just didn't provide them on Ebay because I'm not a very good photographer and they didn't come out.
As for peoples' comments about how their 15C was wrapped, I think it is entirely likely that HP changed the box and wrapping during the years they were selling it. In fact, just looking around on the Internet for 5 minutes has shown that there are a few different boxes. Just go to www.hp-collection.org/Rechner/hp-15c.htm Mine looks like the box on the right. However, it is not exactly the same - the description on mine is slightly different. Also, notice that the manual in that picture is bound rather than punched and bound with wire like mine - an obvious move towards cheaper packaging and materials in my calculator. There is no way it would ever fit in the box if it was anything other than shrink-wrapped to the manual...the box is not very big. I know my father would not have cared enough to rewrap it because he had so many of these things...and he could probably get more from work whenever he wanted.
Finally, you're right Raymond, it was a difficult to choose whether or not to open the item. Not because I'm worried it is a "dummy," but just to see if it works. I decided to leave it wrapped because these are very high quality calculators...I'm sure it is fine.
Thank you all for a very interesting and unexpected conversation. I would have never thought that they way an old calculator is wrapped would spark such a lively debate.
P.S. The manual is shrinkwrapped separately from the calculator, and then the whole thing was wrapped again with the calculator
Edited: 11 Aug 2003, 11:55 a.m.
