HP Portable Plus ... until 2039?

[Jim Horn]

Sorry for the rambling earlier. Why do they only allow years to 2039? What we did find in perusing the PAM binaries was that instead of computing and displaying values when varying the partition between user RAM and drive A:, it had a set of all possible values and associated strings in a table. So I strongly suspect the limit of 60 years for the calendar setting is the size of the table they used, not the hardware or other software that actually uses it.

If that's the case, then the PAM code could be reverse engineered and modified to cover a longer range (hard) or a utility written to set the year directly (less hard - still requires figuring out where the year data is). Since the time is kept on the Portable by a dedicated separate microprocessor when it's powered off, the protocol used to do that may be tricky to figure out. Maybe someone has already done that in the 30 years since it came out. But if not, at least the schematics and more are available to help.