France Rode

His contribution to the development of HP-35, the first handheld scientific calculator, was publicly honored as part of the IEEE Milestone in Electrical Engineering and Computing celebration held at Hewlett Packard, Palo Alto in April 2009. Photos of the event.

In 1979 France established the company Sielox Inc., which was to develop electronic locks and security devices based on one of his patents. In the same pursuit he also established cooperative relationship with Ljubljana University and with the Slovenian microelectronics firm ISKRA for purposes of manufacturing the required microchips. In 1986 Sielox was acquired by Checkpoint Systems and France became their R&D vice president. In 1990 he moved to Trimble Navigation, where he participated in efforts to embed the new satellite based navigation GPS into airplanes and with additional equipment enable them for blind landing. During the last two years at Trimble Navigation France was heavily involved with attempts to redesign and then integrate the GPS receiver into only two chips. This effort led him to join his two coworkers who established a new company called eRide Inc. Their goal was to design novel GPS receivers, which would make it possible to navigate under diverse condition such as inside the buildings or in other reflective environments but primarily inside a wristwatch.

Hewlett-Packard oscilloscopes had a poor reputation and the top management asked the central Research & Development Laboratory to do something about it. A new promising concept called for an integrated processor and France was asked to help. For him this was such an easy task that he found time to enrich the final prototype named “Smart Scope” with many vital ideas, which later became topics of his doctoral dissertation in 1975.

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.

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 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.

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.