Catalog of Contributed Programs?

Catalog of Contributed Programs? - Printable Version

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Catalog of Contributed Programs? - John Garza (3665) - 05-23-2023 12:26 PM

This question has probably been asked many times, but I can't find the answer with the Forum's search tool.

Who keeps the 'official' libraries of user-submitted programs these days? for the 65,67,97 ?
These libraries were originally maintained by HP.

-J

RE: Catalog of Contributed Programs? - Eric Rechlin - 05-23-2023 12:49 PM

I believe the American HP-65, HP-67/97, and HP-41 Users' Libraries are now maintained by an unspecified landfill in the western US. Solve and Integrate took them after PPC folded, and then trashed them when interest was lost in the early 1990s.

The British Users' Library was saved by an HPCC member, but while he was in a hospital stay his family threw most of it out (the best parts). HPCC might still have some of the "reject" programs though.

The other European Users' Libraries were apparently trashed too, some time ago.

RE: Catalog of Contributed Programs? - John Garza (3665) - 05-23-2023 12:50 PM

Oh dear...

RE: Catalog of Contributed Programs? - David Hayden - 05-23-2023 02:36 PM

(05-23-2023 12:49 PM)Eric Rechlin Wrote: The British Users' Library was saved by an HPCC member, but while he was in a hospital stay his family threw most of it out (the best parts). HPCC might still have some of the "reject" programs though.

The other European Users' Libraries were apparently trashed too, some time ago.

What a shame!

RE: Catalog of Contributed Programs? - Eric Rechlin - 05-23-2023 03:38 PM

A long term goal for me has been to webify the catalog. It would be a digitized version of the whole catalog, with scans of programs linked for download where available. Users could create accounts to track which ones they personally have. Then we could go through the list, see who has each program to try to get a scan, and we could try to recreate the Users' Library from the community.

Just putting all the titles and program numbers into a machine-readable table shouldn't be hard. OCR seems to do a pretty good job reading a clean scan so there hopefully won't be too much typing. Adding descriptions would be nice too, just more work.

Unfortunately, this would need to be done soon, because we are reaching the time when I think a not-insignificant fraction of the community active at that time will start departing us and leaving their collections to families who have no idea what they are and trash them. But I just don't have time to take this on right now.

There were many thousands of unique programs (likely 10,000+) in the libraries. The US HP-41 library had around 3600 programs on its own, I believe. I have PDFs of about 270 of them, collected from various sources.

It is my understanding that the European library had a lot of overlap with the US library, but there were unique programs there too. So finding catalogs for both the US and Europe would be necessary to have a full list.

I don't know how big the European library was, but as of February 1982 there were about 2100 programs in the HP-41 library, and surely that number rose over the subsequent years. That 1982 catalog listed programs in the 10,000-49,999 range, with blocks of 5,000 or 10,000 assigned for each language. I have scans of only about 90 of them, but the vast majority of the program scans are in the 50,000 range which presumably post-date that catalog. I believe many were actually originally scanned by Valentin Albillo; he personally sent me several of his scans, which are now on his site. But that's only a tiny fraction of the total, especially when you consider the other catalogs.

I haven't a clue what the sizes of the 65 or the 67/97 libraries were since I am not seeing any scans of catalogs for those. Finding those would at least give us a better idea of the scope of the project. Looking at the collection of available scans of programs from the 67/97 library (100 or so I think) shows program numbers up to at least 4400 or so.

Clearly there is not one single complete catalog for either Europe or the US, because older calculators fell off the catalog as time progressed, but the latest US catalog I have is here, and it's just for the 41:

https://literature.hpcalc.org/items/2185

The-Site-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named has the February 1982 version of the European catalog, again for the 41, as well as some 41 catalogs from the US Users' Library (though all older than my scan above). For reference, the August 1983 US catalog had around 2500 programs (and about 400 more by August 1984), so it still grew by nearly 50% over the next 6 years. So finding a newer European catalog than 1982 would be essential to have an idea of the true size of the European HP-41 library.

RE: Catalog of Contributed Programs? - jonmoore - 05-23-2023 04:51 PM

Not that it's in any way the same, a good way to sample a few decent programs for the 65, 67 and 97 that you mightn't already know through the HP Solution Books, is to get the emulations of pre-41 (and Voyager) devices that are released by CuVee on iOS (they're more accurately described as simulations but the programs function as they should, although numerical results are based on floating point math).

The 67 and 97 are the stars of the show, but the developer included different program listings with each release so it's good to get all the programmable models can as they're available at a very low price. It's usually easy to adapt programs for the 65/67/97 generation calculators if you know what you're looking for. And if memory serves right, much as the developer has supercharged each calculator emulation with functions that didn't exist on the original models, this convenience feature (for users not familiar with the originals) is easily disabled. You also have the ability to run them at the original speed, which is useful where you'd need to be superhuman to catch 'interstitial' messaging with unclamped performance.

The important thing is that the program listings taken as a whole goes beyond the official HP Solutions books that one can now access via Eric's herculean scanning efforts. There's a very small number of 67/97 listings on the HP41-DVD, which I believe was once available for download via hpcalc.org, although maybe I'm thinking of that other site (Eric will correct me if I'm incorrect).

This obviously doesn't come close to the wealth of user programs HP archived, but it's something.

RE: Catalog of Contributed Programs? - Valentin Albillo - 05-25-2023 12:15 AM

.
Hi , all,

(05-23-2023 03:38 PM)Eric Rechlin Wrote: I believe many were actually originally scanned by Valentin Albillo; he personally sent me several of his scans, which are now on his site.

Right, I scanned some of the many programs I got from the US and Europe Libraries, both for the HP-67 and the HP-41C. In the distant past I had many, many more but they were missing after I returned from my military service. The ones I could recover, which I've uploaded to my site are the following:

There are 11 scans of my own programs (which I submitted to the libraries) in the section HP Calculator Programs, from

HP Program VA425 - UPLE - HP-41C Sistemas de Ecuaciones Diferenciales

to

HP Program VA688 - UPLE 60582 - HP-67 Summation of an Infinite Alternating Series

and many more in section HP Calculator Raw Scans, among them:

In that same section you can also find the various libraries' catalogs I scanned, which include relevant data (title, author, etc) and short descriptions for each program, namely:

HP Raw Scan - HP-41 Users Program Library Europe Catalog

HP Raw Scan - HP-67 Users Program Library Europe Catalog

HP Raw Scan - HP-67 Users Program Library Europe Catalog Supplement

If interested, all mentioned materials can be freely downloaded from my site, as is the case for hundreds of additional programs for assorted HP calcs (HP-25, HP-34C, HP-67, HP-41, etc.) also present there. Have a look !

V.

RE: Catalog of Contributed Programs? - TallKey - 05-25-2023 03:32 AM

(05-23-2023 03:38 PM)Eric Rechlin Wrote: Unfortunately, this would need to be done soon, because we are reaching the time when I think a not-insignificant fraction of the community active at that time will start departing us and leaving their collections to families who have no idea what they are and trash them.

100% agreement on that comment.

This thread reminded me of this story.

The only historical literature I have is represented @hpcalc.org, thank you Eric.