Philadelphia Area HP Handheld Club Meeting

Thursday Feb. 20, 1992 - 7 PM - Drexel University

Philly Conference Status

The 1992 Spring HP Handheld Users Conference to be held on March 27-29 is fast approaching, with registrations beginning to trickle in at an increasing rate. AS of this writing, we have a few people committed to speaking, and a handful of "maybes". There are still plenty of time slots available for folks who wish to speak on HP48, HP95 or other handheld computing topics. Here's the list of speakers as of 2/18/92:

1. Richard Nelson (EduCalc) / HP48 Public Domain Software ROM Cards & Third Party Product Development

2. Dennis York (HP) / Production Development Stages on HP48 plus possible HP95 prod. improvement discussion

3. Ted Dickens (CompuServe) / BBS HP Activities

4. Brian Maguire / HP48 System RPL ROM Card

5. Brian Walsh / HP48 Utilities for TDS multipage RAM cards

6. John Wettroth / HP Handheld I/O Boxes

7. Fred Linton / "Delta Configuration A/B Switches"

8. Jim Cloos / HP48 Internals Issues

This list of "maybes" includes Jan Brittenson (HP48 stuff), Mark Needham of Widget Software company (HP95 hardware), Eric Smith of Essex Marketing (HP95 FORTH programming card), Andy Fu of ACE Technologies (HP95 RAM cards) and others.

I have already received a 16-page paper for our proceedings from Jeremy Smith who cannot be present. In addition, it was suggested that we also include Steve Thomas' recent EduCalc Goodies Disk software index as well. Mike Minard has high hopes that the HP folks will give their okay to our distributing his desktop-published version of the HP48 System RPL documentation from the advanced development tools disk. This document should be a great help for those who will be following Brian Maguire's "SRPL" talk during the conference.

The registrations are beginning to roll in a slightly greater pace, and as of this writing (2/18), we have eleven. Most of those are from out-of-town and it is hoped that at least half of the 50 people on our local mailing list will be able to attend. Final facilities details are being ironed out with Drexel and by the time this meeting is held on 2/20, there may more information on our exact formal meeting location as well as where we'll be able to get together after the dinner break on Saturday evening. If Drexel closes its doors at dinner time, we'll most likely end up back at the Penn Tower Hotel for the informal evening sessions.

As far as maintaining publicity for the conference, we have been frequently posting updates to both Compuserve's HP Forum area and Usenet's handheld, HP48 and palmtops areas (which are also picked up by HP's BBS in Corvallis). In addition, the latest edition of Thaddeus Computing's Palmtop Paper (an HP95 support publication) includes a conference notice, and the upcoming issue of SMI's Forty Eight Forum will be mailed with our one-page conference notice stuffed inside the envelope.

HP48 Insights Volume 2 In Print

The second volume of Bill Wickes' HP48 Insights has finally appeared in print and initial feedback is very favorable. EduCalc recently sold out their initial allotment and have more copies on order. The latest EduCalc catalog is dominated by HP48 and HP95 products, with 12 and 10 pages worth, respectively (out of the 64 total).

1-meg HP95 Version Soon

According to a recently received developer's newsletter from HewlettPackard, an expanded-memory version of the HP95LX will be introduced on March 2nd. For $799. list, a 1-meg RAM version will be available. The 512K version remains one hundred dollars cheaper. In addition, those owners who wish to upgrade their original units will be able to do so for the remainder of 1992 for $190. The HP95 logic board contains three pads for surface-mounted RAM and ROM chips.originally a 1-meg ROM was planned to be stuffed into a single chip, but due to some problems, HP had to use 2 512K chips in its place, leaving only one pad for a 512K RAM. Now that the 1-meg ROM chips are available, the two remaining pads may each contain 512K RAMS. One would assume that upgrades to old machines will consist of replacing the two old ROM chips with a single one while adding a second RAM chip in the location of the resulting vacancy.

There is a high probability that Hewlett-Packard shall be donating a 1-Meg HP95 as a door prize for the conference, which should make someone's trip worthwhile.