The HP-12c and platinum Kinpo story

[Eric Rechlin]

(12-01-2024 08:57 PM)dm319 Wrote:  The forensic testing I did on TVM suggested to me that the software running on my 12c platinum did not come from a clean slate. Most of it is identical to Saturn-and-beyond era HP financial calculators, returning 12 digits, with presumably a 15 digit internal precision. I suspect it is running some of the same C code as those devices.

The Saturn-based financial calculators (10B, 14B, 17B/17BII, 18C/19B/19BII) were not coded in C. They were written in a mix of Saturn assembly and RPL.

I believe the post-Saturn HP ones (20b/30b and 10bII+) were indeed written in C (or C++, I'm not sure), however. For the non-HP ones (10BII/10bII, 12c Platinum/Prestige, 17bII+) the code was written outside HP so implementation details are anybody's guess. Yes, the 10BII and 10bII were different (but similar) calculators -- and totally different from the 10bII+.

Perhaps some similarities between the 12c Platinum and the Saturn machines were more due to the greater number of internal digits compared to the 12C rather than shared code.