HP-41CL Remote Keyboard / Scripting

[Sylvain Cote]

(04-17-2021 07:50 PM)rocket.scientist Wrote:  While Sylvain and Monte (and others I am sure) have developed the excellent "clupdate" tool to facilitate, there is still a lot of manual coordination between PC and calc. It would be nice, since the full process is so well known, to have the PC more fully automate the process.

Sure, the reason that the 41CL update works the way it is, was that Monte wanted to be able to do 41CL to 41CL update.
In order to do that, the PC had to become a passive file server and the 41CL had to be the active client/controller who request/send data from/to the PC.

For the HP-71 remote keyboard to work, it has to constantly poll the loop (IDY) to detect service request message (SRQ) and then talk to the keyboard device to get the key pressed on the keyboard.
In order to do that, something must be running in the background to do the constant polling and character fetching, either a software background task, a hardware background task in HP-IL module or a specially designed OS polling point that a software can register to.
To my knowledge the HP-41 does not have that level of complexity in the 41OS nor in the HP-IL module.

The two HP-41 peripherals that can do the equivalent of an asynchronous data entry are: the 82153A Optical Wand and the 82104A Card Reader.

Sylvain

edit 1: there is also the Time Module that can trigger an interrupt. (or something similar)