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HP-85 A.K.A Capricorn
05-29-2018, 08:56 PM (This post was last modified: 05-29-2018 08:57 PM by Jim Horn.)
Post: #13
RE: HP-85 A.K.A Capricorn
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!
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Messages In This Thread
HP-85 A.K.A Capricorn - smp - 05-24-2018, 09:27 PM
RE: HP-85 A.K.A Capricorn - Don Shepherd - 05-24-2018, 09:48 PM
RE: HP-85 A.K.A Capricorn - snuci - 05-25-2018, 09:09 PM
RE: HP-85 A.K.A Capricorn - smp - 05-28-2018, 12:52 PM
RE: HP-85 A.K.A Capricorn - Eddie W. Shore - 05-28-2018, 05:17 PM
RE: HP-85 A.K.A Capricorn - Dieter - 05-28-2018, 09:50 PM
RE: HP-85 A.K.A Capricorn - Steve Simpkin - 05-28-2018, 11:31 PM
RE: HP-85 A.K.A Capricorn - Dieter - 05-29-2018, 06:59 PM
RE: HP-85 A.K.A Capricorn - acoto - 05-29-2018, 07:26 PM
RE: HP-85 A.K.A Capricorn - Jim Horn - 05-29-2018 08:56 PM



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