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Eric Rechlin · 10-04-2021, 04:56 AM

For well over a year, I have been working on a new web site, my HP Calculator Literature web site.

Back in 2008, I was approached by HP, which had some ideas for enhancements for my web site. We discussed a lot of things, some of which have been implemented, some of which were abandoned, and some of which got postponed.

One item that we discussed was having all the manuals available for download from my site. One difficulty with HP's web site has been that downloads tend to come and go, so that manuals that may have been available at one point may not be available at a later point, so HP felt it would be good for me to be hosting everything as a mirror. The calculator division was (and, as best as I can tell, still is) frustrated with the difficulty of getting things posted (and keeping them online) on their official web site. Also, over the years various people have sent me scans of manuals, or given me authorization to put their own writings on my site (sometimes even sending me their books for free), and I wanted to host these as well. This idea sat on hold for over a decade for a variety of reasons, including the higher cost of hosting in the past and also simply finding the time to do the project.

I started getting serious about the idea of bringing a manuals site online after some discussions at HHC 2019, and while I was stuck at home in the summer of 2020, I finally started work on the site. My initial plan was just to aggregate all the manuals from HP (337 at the time), then add some scans made by others in the community that I would clean up, and finally scan some manuals myself (both books I own myself, plus a small number I intended to borrow from others that I felt were important to scan).

I had largely completed this goal at HPCC 2020, where I first announced this site to the limited group as a soft launch. My plan was to do a full public launch once finishing, which I was getting close to reaching in February.

However, things changed. My plan had been to borrow the couple dozen or so manuals I wanted to scan from Richard Nelson. But in my discussions with him, I found he was planning to entirely divest himself of his HP collection, and furthermore, was willing to lend me everything before this happened. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so I couldn't pass up the opportunity to scan hundreds of manuals, despite the huge effort this would be.

One more necessary task arose because Richard's calculator collection was so vast that even he didn't know what he had, so first I had to determine which books I needed to scan so he could verify what I needed. This required me to create a list of all known calculator documentation so I could mark off which ones I had scanned and which ones I still needed.

All this led me to postpone the official announcement of my new site until after I had made a substantial amount of progress on this expanded project.

Additionally, I have since been able to get hundreds of additional PDFs from HP that somehow never made it onto their web site, further expanding the collection of official HP releases.

So now, at HHC 2021, I gave a talk about a variety of topics related to this project, which included making the official public launch of the site. For those of you unable to attend the conference, a video should be posted online shortly.

This project is still nowhere near complete, as I still have hundreds of manuals left to scan, which I will continue doing over the coming months, plus over 100 scans done by others that I plan to clean up and add as PDFs as well, but at present the site includes the following:

542 PDFs from HP, totaling 86,968 pages (of which 518, with 80,211 pages, are original PDFs and not scans)
225 PDFs, totaling 31,262 pages, that were scanned by others in the user community and cleaned up by me
61 original (not scanned) PDFs with 8,996 pages, both from the community and myself
352 PDFs with 34,306 pages scanned by me personally

This means the site presently has a grand total of 1180 PDFs totaling 161,532 pages.

The site can be reached at https://literature.hpcalc.org, where all scans are available for download.

Separately, the full list of known HP-related documentation, including part numbers where known, now has 2160 items on it. It can be viewed at https://literature.hpcalc.org/all

You can sort and filter this list, as well as show or hide columns to display only the information you want. Unfortunately, my JavaScript skills aren't the best, and filtering tends to be slow on Chrome (it works great on Firefox, however) -- any advice here would be appreciated. Clicking on a title will open a page with more information, including an indication on unscanned items of whether I expect to scan the book soon or do not have any expectation of getting it soon, as well as information on scanned items about details of the scan and credit to the person who scanned it. An image of the cover is also shown for scanned pages. Some books are only presently available in other collections (hpmuseum.net, the hpmuseum.org USB drive, or the Site That Must Not Be Named), so in those cases I link to the external site on this page.

I know there are probably many books not on my list. While I feel the English-language list is fairly close to complete, due to lack of knowledge (on my part) of non-English language materials, I suspect there are quite a few of those that I have not listed, especially books written by the user community. Any additions would be appreciated so I can complete the list; I would like to know, if possible, the title, author, language, publish date, ISBN or part number, and anything else known about anything I am missing.

My goal with this scanning project is to make definitive scans of the highest quality so that nobody else ever has to scan these again. All processing is done at 600 dpi, though for the foreseeable future I have the PDFs rendered at only 400 dpi due to minimal benefit of higher resolution. For scans made by others in the user community which were nearly always done at lower resolution, my long-term goal is to rescan as many of these as possible; in the near future I already have plans to rescan about 25% of them. At some point I will be seeking to borrow books from others in the community to come closer to completing this project, but I presently have enough to keep me busy well into the next year.