The programmable calculator the HP-30b should have been

[walter b]

(09-09-2014 07:15 AM)Thomas Radtke Wrote:  Also interesting - http://www.hpmuseum.org/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/...ead=152580

Oh yeah, our baby was 8 months old then ... and had still many months to go until birth.

d:-)

[Paul Dale]

(09-09-2014 08:29 AM)walter b Wrote:  Oh yeah, our baby was 8 months old then ... and had still many months to go until birth.

Several years more in fact. And the specifications changed a bit since that posting, well primarily the number of programming steps got massively increased -- some in RAM and many many more in flash -- mostly thanks to Marcus who implemented all this. Then we added double precision, some more registers, many more programming functions, stopwatch, printing and more.

For longer than I can remember, I'd had been working on some mega-super-four-banger-scientific firmware, several parts of which made it into the 34S, before I contacted Walter about a collaborative project

Finally, this was the 34s not the 34S. We uppercased the name later.


The bottom line is writing quality calculator firmware in your spare time takes years. As a full time job, I expect it still takes quite a while to get things right.


- Pauli

[Joseph_21sv]

One thing about the key layout of the CW-32B:
Since I conceive it as being fundamentally a programmable calculator, the CW-32B will have a row of keys dedicated to programming functions, that much is undebatable.
Here is what the key row will look like:
Unshifted: P/R|GOTO |LBL |?x=|IS? |SOLVE|FLAGS
Shifted: R/S|GOSUB|RETURN|?≠|DS? |STOP |PAUSE
The menus will be:
GOTO—1 GOTO, 2 GOTOT, 3 GOTOF
Shift+GOSUB—1 GOSUB, 2 GOSUBT, 3 GOSUBF, 4 XEQ
Shift+GOSUB+4—1 XEQ, 2 XEQT, 3 XEQF
?x=—1 ?=, 2 ?≈, 3 ?≥, 4 ?≳, 5 ?≤, 6 ?≲
Shift+?≠—1 ?≠, 2 ?≉, 3 ?<, 4 ?>
IS?—1 ISE, 2 ISA, 3 ISG
Shift+DS?—1 DSE, 2 DSA, 3 DSL
FLAGS—1 SF, 2 CF, 3 TF
FLAGS+1—1 SF, 2 SFT, 3 SFF
FLAGS+2—1 CF, 2 CFT, 3 CFF
FLAGS+3—1 TF, 2 TFT, 3 TFF, 4 TFI
FLAGS+3+4—1 TFIS, 2 TFIST, 3 TFISF, 4 TFIC, 5 TFICT, 6 TFICF
What do you all think of this layout?