RPN-PRGM: New Windows console application emulating HP calculators

[Aacini]

Hi. My name is Antonio. Since many years ago I have been a very loyal user of Hewlett-Packard calculators. I remember that time when a friend of mine show me his brand-new HP-21 calculator he bought the next day it was released! Some time after, I bought my first HP calculator: a brand-new HP-25. Several years ago I started to bought and collect ancient HP calculators. I have now a collection of about 60 Hewlett-Packard calculators that includes some jewels, like a working HP-9810A, a working HP-35 with the 2.02 ln e^x = 2.00 bug, and a never used HP-Xpander new-in-the-box! But this is another story...

I learned IBM-1130 assembly language in 1977, when I was 22 years old. In 1981, after the IBM-PC was released, I bought the first computer of my own: a cheaper Columbia "Transportable" PC-compatible model. I bought Borland Turbo Assembler 1.0, learned Intel 8086 assembly language, and started to write some interesting and unusal programs. I continued writting MASM32 assembly language programs for Windows PC computers since then.

I recently joined the two old loves of my life: HP calculators and Intel assembly language. I wrote a Windows console application that allows to use the PC processor like a HP calculator. It makes possible to directly use the x87 FPU stack as if it were an 8-registers HP calculator (like in the WP 34S) and execute floating point operations in the fastest possible way, using native FPU instructions. This application, called RPN-PRGM, allows any person capable of use an HP calculator to write programs for the PC that run faster than the ones created by standard compilers. It also may serve as a straightforward introduction to Intel MASM32 assembly programming language.

I invite you to test the first version of this application called RPN.exe; you may download it from this site.

Antonio