71 & 75 Math ROMs, Series 80 Matrix ROM

[Valentin Albillo]

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Hi, brickviking :

(05-30-2018 01:51 AM)brickviking Wrote:  If I'd been able to afford the 71B, what would my primary use for it be?

Only you could answer that. In my case, my primary use for it was for professional engineering computations, plus advanced numerical analysis and hobbies (I wrote a chess mate-in-N problems solver for it).

Quote: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.

You could use a full-screen monitor with the HP-71B plus an external keyboard and even a printer and either a tape drive or a disk drive, all of them connected via HP-IL. That way you could almost exactly mimic the experience of using a typical personal computer such as the Apple ][ or the IBM PC, with the advantage over them of being able to use very powerful ROMs (for example the Math ROM for anything having to do with advanced transcendental functions, complex numbers, matrices, integration up to 5-level deep, finding all roots of polynomials, solving arbitrary equations or systems of up to 5 non-linear equations, and Fourier transforms, among many other things, at machine-code speeds).

This was a whole lot of computation muscle that neither the Apple ][ nor the IBM PC could even approach. Plus you could fit the HP-71B system with up to 512 Kb of RAM (no "RAM disks" or anything like that, just normal RAM).

Quote: Has that Math ROM been reworked since? Was a new Math ROM created from scratch with the expanded functionality?

No and no. I could probably add some of the missing functionality myself if I had the Math ROM IDS (fully documented [and commented] assembler listings) but they don't seem to exist anymore or are completely unavailable.

Quote:As you can probably tell, I don't know much about this machine.

It's a wonderful machine, that's why it is my favorite one, head and shoulders over the many HP models I've fully known and used in the past (nearly all the non-financial classics plus the 41Cxx, 42S, 35s and even the 75C).

If you want to have a look at it and run some software on it, you can either get a physical one (quite cheap on TAS [The-Auctions-Site ]) or use J-F Garnier's Emu71 emulator which I believe is completely free. There are other excellent emulators as well, even one which runs on an RPL model.

Regards.
V.
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