Asking HP to open source HP calculator software and patents

[cyrille de brébisson]

Hello,

Multiple points here...
1) Yes, big companies do loose stuff, all the time. In the case of the 28/48 source code, when the calculator operation was created in australia, we where told that all the data was on the "Scoobidoo" server... althrough said server might have existed in the past (actually, we could track no less than 7 servers named like this from the lates 80's to the mid 90's!), we were unable to recover the source codes as, even if these things were backedup, the backups could not be restored on more modern systems (backup are notoriously OS dependent)
This taught me one thing about backup systems. It tought me that you do NOT need backup systems. You need RESTORE systems! And that pure files works much better than any type of "backup" systems!

2) For the story, we ended up getting the 48/38 source code from an ex HP employee that had departed HP 4 or 5 years prior (for a competitor in addition!) and who had had the good idea to keep a personal copy of the code!
But this did not include any of the hptools (which we got from the publicly released version. Probably from Joe horn's disks!)

3) The Saturn ASM routines that I transposed to C are all the math functions. I have not done the same work for the RPL core system.

4) Can you confirm my understanding of what you said: you have the HP41 source code? and would like to be able to publish it? If yes, I would apreciate a copy, and I can add this to the list of things to publish...

Cheers,
Cyrille