HP 110 (not Portable Plus) Technical Manual

[Martin Hepperle]

In the meantime I tested some Turbo Pascal Functions, which I had written for the Portable Plus, on the Portable.
I use Turbo Pascal 3.0, because it is so small that it runs nicely on the Portable leaving enough space on its 150 KB RAM disk.
For exchanging files with my laptop I used the built-in TERMINAL program and the XMODEM function of Teraterm. Due to the 128 Byte Packets this is slow, but more practical than juggling disks.

To summarize:

• Of course, running the MS-DOS system, the Portable and the Portable Plus both support standard DOS calls for text i/o.
• Both systems support a standard set of escape sequences for output in Alpha mode, including positioning and character attributes.
• The Portable has 3 character attributes (normal, inverse, blinking) while the Portable Plus adds underline.
• Only the Portable Plus offers escape sequences for graphics output. Not fast, but easy to use with any programming language.
• HP's BIOS support for the HP-IL functions is present in both, the Portable and the Portable Plus. A program using HP-IL works on both of them.
• The BIOS support for directly accessing the the Alpha and Graphics screen is only present in the Portable Plus (FastAlpha and FastGraphics). In the Portable you have to write your own code, directly accessing the display RAM in Alpha and Graphics mode.
  

I will add some documentation and then make my Pascal routines available. They comprise a complete set of HP-IL as well as simple graphics (line drawing) procedures.

Martin