Catalog of Contributed Programs?

[Eric Rechlin]

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.