Asking HP to open source HP calculator software and patents

[Giuseppe Donnini]

Hi Cyrille,

Thanks a lot for answering this kind of questions!

(05-16-2018 04:58 AM)cyrille de brébisson Wrote:  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)

If the server still exists, and if HP management doesn't object, it would be invaluable to recover these data, even in raw, binary form. A temporarily unreadable source is better than no source at all. And there might be people out there with more time at their hands than the company's employees, who might make it readable again one day.

Quote: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!)

Could you then confirm that you yourself, or the ACO team in general, never used the original development tools as seen in the following picture (actually a screenshot from a video taken by Jake Schwartz during one of Bill Wickes' presentations in the early 90's --- Thanks again, Jake, for all your efforts in preserving HP calculator culture for posterity!).



And what about the so-called ERS (External Reference Specification) for the HP-28/HP-48? Bill Wickes used to consult it whenever he had to face a question about a subtle, intricate detail he had forgotten. The RPL48 package by Raymond Del Tondo and Detlef Müller contained a small excerpt (with permission by HP Corvallis) from the HP-48 kernel ERS (dated August 7, 1986), namely chapter 11 about the "RPL Reader and Parser Tools", and this is surely one of the most interesting reads I came across, and well worth preserving.

Quote: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.

Is there any chance that the source code of the HP-71B Math ROM might have survived? The implementation of the IEEE floating point math exceptions would be of particular interest here. A careful comparison of the source code given in the HP-71B Software IDS (vol.III) with a HP-48 ROM disassembly shows that - amazingly enough - the whole core of the IEEE math was preserved in the HP-48 code, albeit without the user shell around it. So, I think it would be an interesting project to implement a full-blown, separate IEEE user mode on the HP-48 (maybe in the style of Jake Schwartz' and Rick Grevelle's HP-16C emulator mode, with appropriate status line information for the exception flags, warnings, errors, etc.). Unfortunately, the HP-71B Software IDS only covers the main math routines, whereas the HP-48 code also includes the whole wider functionality of the Math ROM.