HP-85 A.K.A Capricorn

[smp]

While looking for something else (I'm a very amateur astronomer) I stumbled across a stash of files today. This one caught my attention:

http://vintagecomputer.ca/files/Hewlett%20Packard/
http://vintagecomputer.ca/files/Hewlett%...Manual.pdf

I don't know if anyone else has posted this, and I don't know if it is already available in the voluminous stash here at the MoHPC, but I felt it might be interesting to some here.

Thanks for looking! I hope this is useful.

smp

[Don Shepherd]

thanks, very interesting.

[Valentin Albillo]

(05-24-2018 09:27 PM)smp Wrote:  While looking for something else (I'm a very amateur astronomer) I stumbled across a stash of files today. This caught my attention [...]

Thank you very much, such fond memories ! I worked a lot with the HP-85 in tbe early 80's creating (very expensive) professional engineering applications. The HP-85 itself was very expensive as well, you could buy a 140 m\(^2\) flat for just 3x the money.

Thanks again, it'll be my pleasure to read it whole.

Regards.
V.
.

[snuci]

Thanks smp.

I scanned this out of many HP85 manuals I received from an old HP tech. If anyone wants to put this document in the archive because it's not there, please do so. I am the maintainer of http://vintagecomputer.ca

Sorry for the newbie question but would someone please post a link to the HP85 section of the archive? I just want to see if there's anything else I may have that's not there.

Thanks.

[smp]

(05-25-2018 09:09 PM)snuci Wrote:  ... Sorry for the newbie question but would someone please post a link to the HP85 section of the archive? I just want to see if there's anything else I may have that's not there.

Just click on the MoHPC logo at the top of the page. That will bring you to the Museum top page and the list of all the HP calculators.

smp

[Martin Hepperle]

I think the same copy can be found in the files section of the Series-80 groups.io web site.
When I first looked at the cover I was wondering what the lower end of the Capricorn is intended to show. Is it wearing a tie? Or does it have flippers ;-)

Martin

[Eddie W. Shore]

Watching a few videos on the HP 85. I like the screen that comes with the unit. I understand it had all the HP calculator functions (at the time - like the 41C or 67?).

[Valentin Albillo]

(05-28-2018 05:17 PM)Eddie W. Shore Wrote:  Watching a few videos on the HP 85. I like the screen that comes with the unit. I understand it had all the HP calculator functions (at the time - like the 41C or 67?).

What do you mean by that ? It had the usual mathematical functions found in most other popular BASIC implementations, give or take a couple.

V.
.

[Dieter]

(05-28-2018 06:45 PM)Valentin Albillo Wrote:  

(05-28-2018 05:17 PM)Eddie W. Shore Wrote:  Watching a few videos on the HP 85. I like the screen that comes with the unit. I understand it had all the HP calculator functions (at the time - like the 41C or 67?).

What do you mean by that ? It had the usual mathematical functions found in most other popular BASIC implementations, give or take a couple.

Hmmm... let's go back to early 1980s. What were the popular BASIC implementations back then? Apple Integer and Applesoft BASIC, TRS80 BASIC, or the versions for the various Commodore 2000...8000 series computers. Any other popular dialects? Maybe Microsoft BASIC?

Then take a look at the mathematical functions of these BASICs. What you get is essentially a square root, exp and natural log, power, sin/cos/tan, abs, int and maybe sgn, and atn as the only inverse trig function. And all this with radians as the only available angle unit.

In contrast, the HP85 featured three angle modes, a complete set of inverse trig functions (asn, acs, even two atn functions), sec, csc, cot, ceil, floor, ip and fp, natural and base-10 logs, remainder, and more. And all this in 12-digit BCD precision over a domain that is even larger than today's 52-bit double-precision.

So it looks like, at least for numeric applications, compared with the common BASIC dialects of the time the HP85 was far superior. But of course I don't know all BASICs that were around in the early 80s. Which ones, would you say, had a comparable set of mathematical functions?

Dieter

[Steve Simpkin]

(05-28-2018 09:50 PM)Dieter Wrote:  

(05-28-2018 06:45 PM)Valentin Albillo Wrote:  What do you mean by that ? It had the usual mathematical functions found in most other popular BASIC implementations, give or take a couple.

Hmmm... let's go back to early 1980s. What were the popular BASIC implementations back then? Apple Integer and Applesoft BASIC, TRS80 BASIC, or the versions for the various Commodore 2000...8000 series computers. Any other popular dialects? Maybe Microsoft BASIC?

Then take a look at the mathematical functions of these BASICs. What you get is essentially a square root, exp and natural log, power, sin/cos/tan, abs, int and maybe sgn, and atn as the only inverse trig function. And all this with radians as the only available angle unit.

In contrast, the HP85 featured three angle modes, a complete set of inverse trig functions (asn, acs, even two atn functions), sec, csc, cot, ceil, floor, ip and fp, natural and base-10 logs, remainder, and more. And all this in 12-digit BCD precision over a domain that is even larger than today's 52-bit double-precision.

So it looks like, at least for numeric applications, compared with the common BASIC dialects of the time the HP85 was far superior. But of course I don't know all BASICs that were around in the early 80s. Which ones, would you say, had a comparable set of mathematical functions?

Dieter

My first exposure to the BASIC language was using a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I with a 4K Level I Basic installed in 1977. This single-precision floating point version of Basic only directly supported four math operators (+,-,x,/). As the language lacked many common math functions, the (well written) user's manual provided subroutine listings for square root, exponentiation, exponentials, logarithms, arithmetic sign, and trigonometry functions.

My first computer, a 1978 Ohio Scientific Challenger 1P, had an 8K BASIC written by Microsoft. While it did have a fairly complete set of floating point math functions, it was limited to 6-1/2 digits of precision.

The moral to this tale is that not all BASIC's were created equal.

[Dieter]

(05-28-2018 11:31 PM)Steve Simpkin Wrote:  My first computer, a 1978 Ohio Scientific Challenger 1P, had an 8K BASIC written by Microsoft. While it did have a fairly complete set of floating point math functions, it was limited to 6-1/2 digits of precision.

Maybe this depends on the definition of "fairly complete". ;-)

The versions of Microsoft BASIC I know of are similar to other common BASIC dialects of the day: the mathematical function set is not even close to what a scientific pocket calculator has to offer.

Which BASIC version supported a complete set of trig functions, several angular modes, angle conversions and other goodies that were standard on pocket calculators? The HP85 did. Any others? In the early 1980s?

Dieter

[acoto]

Commodore 64 Basic and Kernal dissasembly here:
https://github.com/mist64/c64rom/blob/ma...rom_en.txt

*** perform COS()
.,E264 A9 E0 LDA #$E0 set pi/2 pointer low byte
.,E266 A0 E2 LDY #$E2 set pi/2 pointer high byte
.,E268 20 67 B8 JSR $B867 add (AY) to FAC1
*** perform SIN()
.,E26B 20 0C BC JSR $BC0C round and copy FAC1 to FAC2
.,E26E A9 E5 LDA #$E5 set 2*pi pointer low byte
.,E270 A0 E2 LDY #$E2 set 2*pi pointer high byte
.,E272 A6 6E LDX $6E get FAC2 sign (b7)
.,E274 20 07 BB JSR $BB07 divide by (AY) (X=sign)
...
*** perform TAN()
.,E2B4 20 CA BB JSR $BBCA pack FAC1 into $57
.,E2B7 A9 00 LDA #$00 clear A
.,E2B9 85 12 STA $12 clear the comparison evaluation flag
.,E2BB 20 6B E2 JSR $E26B perform SIN()'
...

have fun!

[Jim Horn]

The HP-85 came along after HP's 9000 family was well established, including the "Rocky Mountain BASIC" (RMB) 9835, 9845, 9836 and more. That was a very powerful BASIC created by HP's Desktop Computer Division in Loveland, Colorado. I earned my living at HP's Redwood Project (later part of Signal Analysis Division in Santa Rosa, CA) pushing RMB fairly hard to first emulate the HP-50000 family of modular instrumentation then to create compilers for embedded firmware for the same. Modular structured code with dynamic run-time linking in BASIC in 1984? Worked great in an earth shattering 8MHz Motorola MC68000 with 1 megabyte of RAM.

If anyone is familiar with RMB from then, the "dynamic run-time linking" was indeed possible by printing into the keyboard input buffer. That allowed a program to stop itself, append such new portions from disk as needed, then rerun itself with the new code included. I never saw that documented anywhere but it allowed me to do the simulations and compilations I needed. Fun times!