why was the wand made?

[John Ioannidis]

(08-11-2024 01:56 AM)rprosperi Wrote:  At the time, printed media was the primary distribution media, for example all the User Library Programs, HP magazines, PPC Journal and more. Other 'competitive' systems used printed assembler and / or BASIC listings, but these had weaknesses such as zeros look like letter o's, 1's look like I's, etc. while the barcode system was relatively error-free and much faster, in addition to being far cheaper than cards.

Today, it seems kinda quaint, but back in the day, these were extensively used by experts and noobs alike, and it was the quickest way to distribute and enter lengthy programs.

Yes, I remember actually *buying* solutions books that had bar codes in them, and entering them with the wand (which I had gotten as a bonus for submitting a lot of programs to the Users' Program Library - Europe), but I still would found it weird. I also remember Byte magazine having barcode listings in some other format.

I'm looking at a 1978 Key Notes issue; solutions books for the HP67/97 were $10, and application packs, which included cards, were $35. By 1983, solutions books for the hp41 were $20, and packs with modules were still $35, or thereabouts. It's fair to assume that a solutions book with accompanying cards would be $10-$20 more expensive; you'd have to get ten of them to make up for the price of a wand. Was any other software for the hp41 distributed as barcodes? Most user-submitted programs at the users' libraries did not come with barcodes, and when you ordered something, you got it with magnetic cards (submitting programs with lots of cards, then ordering them with bonus coupons was our way of getting free cards ).

What I mostly used the wand for was to create synthetic instruction barcodes (drawing them by hand with a marker!); a lot easier to do than with the byte grabber

Has anyone bothered to disassemble the wand rom? How hard would it have been to write some extra code to read other common barcodes, such as UPC?