"HP-71 BASIC Made Easy" in PDF form

[Joe Horn]

I finally got around to converting my 1985 book "HP-71 BASIC Made Easy" into a searchable PDF file. The pagination and formatting is not the same as the original, but the text is the same with only minor corrections made, and hopefully not many OCR errors introduced.

Those familiar with the HP-71 should skip Chapters 1-5, which are intended only for newbies overwhelmed by HP's manuals. Chapters 6 and onwards contain goodies not in the manuals.

Submitted corrigenda will be greatly appreciated. The online copy at the above link will be kept updated, with the most recent edit date shown on page 3.

[Geoff Quickfall]

Many many thanks Joe! Your book has been my go to for the 71b.

Cheers, Geoff

[Bill (Smithville NJ)]

Hi Joe,

Very nice. I love the "Answer Man Section. Does that offer still apply with the free PDF?

Hope you don't mind, but I took your PDF and added Bookmarks to it.

Please send me an email and I'll send you a copy that you can use as you see fit.

Bill

[kakima]

Thanx. I just copied it to my Kindle for tomorrow's trans-Atlantic flight.

[Les Bell]

(10-26-2014 01:09 AM)Joe Horn Wrote:  I finally got around to converting my 1985 book "HP-71 BASIC Made Easy" into a searchable PDF file. The pagination and formatting is not the same as the original, but the text is the same with only minor corrections made, and hopefully not many OCR errors introduced.

Thanks, Joe - I devoured the version on the Museum DVD a few months ago, when I first got my 71, and this will be very useful.

[Massimo Gnerucci]

(10-26-2014 01:09 AM)Joe Horn Wrote:  I finally got around to converting my 1985 book "HP-71 BASIC Made Easy" into a searchable PDF file. The pagination and formatting is not the same as the original, but the text is the same with only minor corrections made, and hopefully not many OCR errors introduced.

Those familiar with the HP-71 should skip Chapters 1-5, which are intended only for newbies overwhelmed by HP's manuals. Chapters 6 and onwards contain goodies not in the manuals.

Submitted corrigenda will be greatly appreciated. The online copy at the above link will be kept updated, with the most recent edit date shown on page 3.

Thank you very much, Joe.

[Joe Horn]

(10-26-2014 01:52 AM)Bill (Smithville NJ) Wrote:  I love the "Answer Man Section. Does that offer still apply with the free PDF?

Page 129 of the PDF: "This service will remain active until five years after the HP-71 has been removed from the official Hewlett-Packard Price List, at which time it will be terminated."

[Bill (Smithville NJ)]

(10-26-2014 11:53 AM)Joe Horn Wrote:  

(10-26-2014 01:52 AM)Bill (Smithville NJ) Wrote:  I love the "Answer Man Section. Does that offer still apply with the free PDF?

Page 129 of the PDF: "This service will remain active until five years after the HP-71 has been removed from the official Hewlett-Packard Price List, at which time it will be terminated."

Oops, I missed the termination notice.

Joe, Please just ignore the question I just sent you in the mail. But I was looking forward to getting a personal postcard from you with the answer.

Just Kidding - I didn't send you a question.


But that does beg the question: How many questions did you received and were you ever stumped by any of them?

Bill

[Eddie W. Shore]

(10-26-2014 01:09 AM)Joe Horn Wrote:  I finally got around to converting my 1985 book "HP-71 BASIC Made Easy" into a searchable PDF file. The pagination and formatting is not the same as the original, but the text is the same with only minor corrections made, and hopefully not many OCR errors introduced.

Those familiar with the HP-71 should skip Chapters 1-5, which are intended only for newbies overwhelmed by HP's manuals. Chapters 6 and onwards contain goodies not in the manuals.

Submitted corrigenda will be greatly appreciated. The online copy at the above link will be kept updated, with the most recent edit date shown on page 3.

Many, many thanks Joe! This has been added to my long list of things to read.

[Joe Horn]

(10-26-2014 01:14 PM)Bill (Smithville NJ) Wrote:  How many questions did you received and were you ever stumped by any of them?

Just over 2000. Amazingly, they arrived in a steady trickle averaging two a day, so I was never either swamped or bored. I kept them all in a cardboard box until they were destroyed by a leak in my roof during a storm in the early 1990's.

Sadly, roughly half (!!!) of those letters contained exactly the same question: "What is the checksum at the end of line 023 in the CLOCKDSP lexfile hex dump?" (on page 126 of the PDF). A misprint in the book had rendered that line's checksum unreadable, so all those readers had the same aggravation of painstakingly keying in that lexfile, one hex nibble at a time, and then being forced to abort the process after all those lines! <blush, blush>

Most of the other questions were simple to answer, but yes, a few did catch me off guard. But it was easy to pretend to be the all-knowing "HP-71 Answer Man" because of the time delay between the question and the answer: I simply looked up the answer (or figured it out), and then replied oh-so-wisely... without admitting that when I had received their question I had no clue what the answer would be.

EDIT:

(10-26-2014 01:52 AM)Bill (Smithville NJ) Wrote:  Hope you don't mind, but I took your PDF and added Bookmarks to it.

FYI: The online copy has been replaced by Bill's nicely bookmarked version, which is also 2/3rds the size of my original. Thanks, Bill!

[Peter Murphy]

Joe,

The Museum DVD scan of your original hard copy asks that copies not be made and that it not be made available on file-sharing services.

What restrictions, if any, do you place on the this new, improved PDF (your original, or the bookmarked version)?

Many thanks to you Joe and to Bill of Smithville NJ for this new PDF.

(And thanks Wlodek for your donation of the 71B I won at HHC 2014!)

[Joe Horn]

(10-26-2014 09:01 PM)Peter Murphy Wrote:  The Museum DVD scan of your original hard copy asks that copies not be made and that it not be made available on file-sharing services.

Correct, so please don't share the scan which is on the MoHPC disk set.

Quote:What restrictions, if any, do you place on the this new, improved PDF (your original, or the bookmarked version)?

None. It is in the public domain.

[Sylvain Cote]

Thank you very much Joe and Bill.
This is a very nice searchable edition complementing my original paper based ones.
Sylvain

[RMollov]

Thanks Joe, much appreciated.
It's time now to get to BASIC (again after many years) and pull my HP-71B out of it's current dust-gathering location
Cheers,

[RMollov]

on page 26:

Quote:Notice that this answers the negative powers dilemma. 12*-5
works fine because negation comes before powers. So the HP-71
first negates the 5, getting 12*(-5), and then it multiplies.

[Joe Horn]

(10-30-2014 01:24 PM)RMollov Wrote:  on page 26:

Quote:Notice that this answers the negative powers dilemma. 12*-5
works fine because negation comes before powers. So the HP-71
first negates the 5, getting 12*(-5), and then it multiplies.

Hey, good catch! Thanks. The online version has now been corrected, and the "last edited" date on page 3 has been updated to 1 November 2014.

[Paul Dale]

(10-26-2014 01:09 AM)Joe Horn Wrote:  hopefully not many OCR errors introduced.

I noticed a number of Fs being OCRed as P errors when hex codes and addresses were concerned. Sorry, didn't note them explicitly


- Pauli

[RMollov]

on top of page 60:

Quote:The DESTORY command doesn’t just clear a variable; it
completely destroys it!

[Dave Frederickson]

On page 37 of the pdf under ERRN the text is:
TAN(90) because error 14 is “TAN=Inf”.
it should be:
TAN(90) because error #4 is “TAN=Inf”.

[Joe Horn]

(11-01-2014 08:19 AM)Paul Dale Wrote:  

(10-26-2014 01:09 AM)Joe Horn Wrote:  hopefully not many OCR errors introduced.

I noticed a number of Fs being OCRed as P errors when hex codes and addresses were concerned. Sorry, didn't note them explicitly

I hunted, found, and fixed a few on page 111 (in the address column), and one on page 113 (in the line of BASIC). Thanks for the alert! If you notice any more, please advise. Thanks!