HP 110, 150: Looking for Turbo Pascal Version 3.02 for MS-DOS (not PC-DOS/IBM PC)

[Martin Hepperle]

(06-22-2020 07:16 AM)J-F Garnier Wrote:  Many thanks, Martin, for sharing this great finding.
When I will have some time (and when I will have fixed -again- the dead battery) I will put it in a 27C512 EPROM.
Then I will have to remember how to program with TP3...

J-F

The battery could also be replaced with a power supply, if your have a 6V one available.
Otherwise: I used these Cyclon/Hawker 2V cells to replace the battery about 2 years ago and try to regularly recharge them to keep them in good health.
[It is always the question whether it is worth to replace batteries which will die a natural death 3-5 years later. I now almost follow a regular "charging plan" with all those batteries for HP-IL printer and cassette, Voltmeter, Portables, Thinkjets, 9114s, what else...]

The nice thing is that Turbo Pascal needs less than 64 KB disk space - you can even leave off the error messages.
And due to this "size", the editor starts up quite fast and can be used for all kind of text file editing.

I also have Turbo-C running on the Portable Plus, but only the command line version TCC with MAKE and LINK and the small memory libraries. The GUI/IDE does not work because of the direct screen memory access.
While Turbo Pascal programs are limited to 64 KB (still enough for many small to medium size tools) Turbo-C programs can be larger, depending on memory model.

My plan is to make a small Turbo Pascal include file of HP-IL routines for talking to e.g. the 3468 Voltmeter or 3421 Data Acquisition box. I have done that for Turbo C, but the development cycle is much slower than with Turbo Pascal.

Let us know, when you have an EPROM image ready - I also would like to burn one (a single half-bank EPSOM should be enough). I have just re-read the EPROM burning manuals and experimented bit with EDISK.SYS, but not really created something.

Martin