ACT available

[PANAMATIK]

Another major step "backward" is done!

This sounds funny, why should I go a step backward with the new ACT?

The answer is:

I made the original HP-35 firmware running on the ACT!

Thus a woodstock calculator can be transformed into a classic calculator now. I replaced the woodstock emulator by the classic emulator and programmed the original HP-35 firmware. Thanks to Eric's wonderful "nonpareil" source code, which shows exactly how the classic processor works, now it is behaving (nearly) exactly like the good old first pocket calculator.

Surely this is not a practical approach, because everything the HP-35 offers, the woodstocks could do as well. But it is really beautiful to see that the same keys typed on an HP-25 produce the same results as the same keys on an HP-35.

Well, there are some differences.

Because the 20s have only 12-digits instead of 15, the last 2 digits of mantissa will be hidden if an exponent is shown. This is the same behaviour that HP invented when the woodstock models were introduced. This kind of flexible formatting and reducing digits allowed to make the calculators cheaper than the first one.

Another small difference: because we don't have so many digits, the decimal point is not shown in a separate digit like in the HP-35.

Also the number of key buttons were reduced from 35 to 30. Oh, how this can be done? 5 buttons are missing in the woodstock keyboard! For everything, there can be found a solution.

The HP-35E, which I likely will call it, doubles the first keyboard row by a trick. If you press the buttons of the upper row normally it will execute the functionality of the HP-35s second row. If you hold the buttons for more than 1/2 second it will execute the first row functions.

That's it!

For anybody who has the update kit for the new ACT, you can download the HP35/HP-45/HP80 firmware after I made some final tests from my website. I think you will have real fun with a physical HP-35 clone, with real buttons. And if you want to have a programmable again, you can update from the HP-35 to the HP-25E or whatever again as often as you want.

The unequal twins after power up.

Now, after this is done, probably I don't know what to do with the coming weekend

Bernhard