71 & 75 Math ROMs, Series 80 Matrix ROM

[brickviking]

(05-28-2018 08:28 PM)Valentin Albillo Wrote:  [...gigantic snip, sorry Valentin...]
They were probably prevented from doing it for whatever marketing reasons. Meanwhile they were ordered to waste lots of time and effort in that useless abomination called CALC MODE, utterly wasting 5 Kb of the System ROM on it only because some <hard expletive> higher up decided that the 71B "had" to have some calculator mode, like the SHARPs and other much simpler calculators did.

I was one of the people who used one of the "simpler" calculators, I very much appreciated that this PC-1247 could also be a calculator, as I was doing a bit of that at the time. Yes, I had to spell everything out, and yes, the 71B wasn't aimed at me, being quite a bit more expensive than the aforementioned PC-1247 that I could barely afford second-hand. If I'd been able to afford the 71B, what would my primary use for it be? At this stage, I'm not sure what I could have got out of a one-line 22-character screen given that all my previous experience had been on the Apple IIe and PCs.

(05-28-2018 08:28 PM)Valentin Albillo Wrote:  

Quote:Finally, the 71 only implements a basic matrix operation set.

How true and how sad. They could have implemented most of the fuller set using those 5 Kb left to waste (filled up with 0's !! can you believe it !!??)

Thanks and best regards.
V.
.

Has that Math ROM been reworked since? Was a new Math ROM created from scratch with the expanded functionality? As you can probably tell, I don't know much about this machine.

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