Reading old HP-65 program cards

[Kostas Kritsilas]

After many years of disuse, I have, with the help of members here, been able to get my HP-65 up and running. The drive roller did in fact, turn to goo, and was replaced, and after some heroic efforts by members here, the read/write ability of the card reader was restored as well.

I have the original, what I would guess is the standard pack for the HP-65 with the factory original black, clipped cards. I am able to read all but 2 of the cards (10% failure rate). The two unreadable cards come up as read errors. The other cards do in fact read and operate correctly. I will eventually get around to re-keying in the two unreadable programs, but they are not something I need to use on a regular basis, so no big deal for me. These cards were all stored in the original, tranlucent plastic flip top box that came with the HP-65, so you had 10 cards stacked together and in one slot, with two slots full of pre-programmed cards, and two slots of blank cards, which is a different and denser format than the later HP-67 flip books used to store cards.

From that, you may have a data point on what kind of success you would have reading the HP-65 cards at the museum.

P.S. My HP-65 is a 1976 machine, as dated by the machine serial number (starts with 1604S). From what I know, the cards date from the same time.