France Rode (November 20, 1934 – June 7, 2017) was a Slovenian engineer and inventor best known for his work on the HP-35 pocket calculator. He was one of the four lead engineers at Hewlett-Packard assigned to this project.
Rode also invented and created the first workable RFID products: workplace entry cards, for which he held several patents.
Early life
France was born in Nožice, Slovenia on November 20, 1934 to farmers father Jože and mother Pepca, born Prešeren, as the oldest of four children. His younger sister Agata and brothers Marko and Aleš completed the family. France started elementary school education in nearby Homec soon after the German occupation of Slovenia during the Second World War. A few months into the first school year the local Partisans burned the school building and the children were prevented from attending formal schooling for the duration of the war. After the war, until the school in Homec was rebuilt, France’s class met in the local church rectory or in a Gasthouse in the mornings and reported for work at the school construction site in the afternoon. Due to an accelerated learning program, France completed the fourth grade in Homec in 1947 and in the fall of the same year began attending high school in Kamnik. He skipped the fifth grade by studying and passing exams designed for the fifth grade during the summer months.
Education and academic interests
His academic interests at that time were in mathematics, physics and natural sciences. Whenever he had to study, France was excused from farm work. However, living on the farm allowed him no time for extracurricular activities for which he envied his schoolmates. Only occasionally he managed to join his peers after school. His fondest memories of such activities include participating in the staging of Hamlet, directed by Ciril Gostič, brother of operas singer Jože Gostič, France’s Godfather. His nostalgic memories also include skiing trips to Mala Planina and staying with his ski buddies in “Steletova koča.”
Living on the farm did have some side benefits. France learned hard work habits and discovered his inventive drive. In his uncle’s carpentry shop next door, he built his own toys and later tools that were otherwise too expensive to buy. He made the slide rule he used during all his academic years in Ljubljana.
France planned to study mathematics at Ljubljana University, but altered his interest to electrical engineering after he visited the University’s electrical engineering laboratories. He never regretted this switch. He felt that in this field he would be able to combine his interest in mathematics with some hands-on work.
Early work
France’s early contact with the world outside Slovenia (which was at that time part of Yugoslavia), were two summer jobs in Germany and a few school excursions. These contacts subsequently led him to visit companies in Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Germany, which exposed him to advanced technologies of that era. They also triggered in him a desire to learn more about new places and people. Soon after his graduation in Ljubljana, he filed an application at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois and in November 1960 he boarded the Slovenian ship Bohinj.
France earned a master's degree in bio-medicine at Northwestern University in 1962. In September of the same year he joined Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto, California where he worked periodically for over twenty years.
Pioneering work on pocket calculator
France’s subsequent contribution was just as vital for HP as the former and it consisted of the first integrated circuit designed within the company. The engineers and the management were anxiously awaiting the arrival of the processed chip, which arose from France’s cutting and pasting of its layout. Being armed with two most important technologies that catapulted Silicon Valley, France was the obvious choice for carrying the intricate load of designing the miniature processor for HP-35, the first scientific pocket calculator. While he did not get the recognition of having designed the first microprocessor in the world, France’s HP-35 calculating unit had all the characteristics associated with a microprocessor. It had a complete instruction set for controlling its arithmetic units. The algorithms for trigonometric and logarithmic algorithms took advantage of this instruction set which has put the slide rule out of business. But it also opened the door to a new genre of pocket calculators.