Re: Non-Scientific Survey of Scientific Calculators

Joel Koltner wrote:
Somehow I'm missing the beginning of this thread, but...

For day-to-day use I started with an HP-32S II, then went to the 33s, and now the 35s... although I've been trying to get around to changing over to an HP 50g given the bugs present in the 35s. (I used an HP-48SX and then GX throughput college to very good effect, and while the 50g is not exactly the same level of quality that those machines were, it does have all their capabilities and more).

For Phil Hobbs: PPC is still alive and well (http://www.hpcc.org/). Jake Schwarz scanned in a bunch of the back issues of their newsletter, "Datafile" and sells copies on CD here: http://www.pahhc.org/ppccdrom.htm . Any chance you were the author of some of those old articles?

---Joel



Joel,

Thanks--those guys look just as nuts now as they were back then. I did a bunch of synthetic programming--I still have the PPC ROM plug-in, and still have the green Wickes synthetic programming book in my office, but haven't looked at it in years. I didn't write any of those articles, but I did subscribe to the newsletter. I remember writing part of an article on mapping all the synthetic instructions for audio tones, but never got it finished.

My interest in calculator programming then was the same as in C++ programming now--namely that I don't have to worry about my own code going away, and because it's done in my own idiosyncratic style, I can easily figure out how to use it years later. (I've sometimes coded with other people, but not usually.)

Thanks for the blast from the past.

For all the non-PPC folk: synthetic programming originally came about due to a crappy power-on reset circuit in the HP-67 and HP-41C. If you took out the battery very briefly, the program memory would come up full of garbage. It turned out that most of it consisted of valid but undocumented opcodes, which you could edit and store on magnetic cards. Once a clever guy figured out how to bootstrap those opcodes, so you could actually program them, the whole synthetic programming thing took off. It was really never much more than a toy, but it was great fun. Calculator programming is a weird combination of assembly and HLL programming--very good for early training for embedded systems, too.

It was pretty cool having 1000 program steps and 100 registers to play with, back in 1979, as well as magnetic storage--I was schlepping punch card decks in 1979, though that was mostly for fun as well.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs
.

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