HP-85 A.K.A Capricorn

[Jim Horn]

The HP-85 came along after HP's 9000 family was well established, including the "Rocky Mountain BASIC" (RMB) 9835, 9845, 9836 and more. That was a very powerful BASIC created by HP's Desktop Computer Division in Loveland, Colorado. I earned my living at HP's Redwood Project (later part of Signal Analysis Division in Santa Rosa, CA) pushing RMB fairly hard to first emulate the HP-50000 family of modular instrumentation then to create compilers for embedded firmware for the same. Modular structured code with dynamic run-time linking in BASIC in 1984? Worked great in an earth shattering 8MHz Motorola MC68000 with 1 megabyte of RAM.

If anyone is familiar with RMB from then, the "dynamic run-time linking" was indeed possible by printing into the keyboard input buffer. That allowed a program to stop itself, append such new portions from disk as needed, then rerun itself with the new code included. I never saw that documented anywhere but it allowed me to do the simulations and compilations I needed. Fun times!