Philadelphia Area HP Handheld Club Meeting

Thurs. October 28, 1993 | Drexel University

Lew Thomas' Presentation at PAHHC

At our last Saturday meeting on 10/16/93, we were treated to a presentation by Lew Thomas on his new HP95LX products. Lew drove up from Virginia to demonstrate his HP-IL interface and DublHdr devices which both plug into the HP95's card port. The HP-IL interface box provides 'IL loop support for HP's loop devices such as printers, disk drives and instrumentation. It also gives the card port back to the user so the 'IL may coexist with one other PCMCIA card-based device. The DublHdr device changes the single card port into a bank of two card ports. Virtually any HP95 user would benefit from such a device. Now, if plug-in application software requires additional memory to be present, the problem is solved. If a user has a memory card and one of the new PCMCIA card-based modems, they both may be attached at the same time. Another exciting possibility would be to allow larger devices to be attached to one of the DublHdr's card ports. Lew demonstrated a version of the box which would allow a 1.8-inch hard drive in a PCMCIA version 2.0 type-III card to be attached to the upper card port. The current state of the art in card-based hard drive capacity is 170 megabytes. Both products are available now from Interloop at 706 Charcot Avenue, San Jose, California 95131. Their phone number is 408-922-0520 and the fax number is 408-922-0545.

Usenet Access for Chicago BBS

Brian Walsh's HP Handheld users' BBS, called Nybble's Byte (708-304-0666), has been in existence for around two years now to provide information, software and other assistance for users of HP handhelds and palmtops. Just recently, I received a note from Brian indicating that next month he will be tapping into Usenet News for even more HP material. The four major newsgroups - comp.sys.handhelds, comp.sys.hp48, comp.sources.hp48 and comp.sys.palmtops - will be accessible. Usage of Nybble's Byte is free and available after 10PM on weekdays and weekends.

HP48GX ROM Continues to Develop

The Puget Sound Area HP users group reports that the Corvallis HP48GX folks are not resting on their laurels. A successor to Operating-System-ROM version "P" will allegedly replaced by version "R" soon. Nothing is known about this version, but there definitely are some bugs to be fixed. Over the past few weeks, the supply of HP48s has gotten rather thin. Although some rumors said that the production line had been stopped again in order for bugs to be fixed, we're now told otherwise. Apparently, the production rate has slowed but has not stopped. EduCalc in California is currently out of machines (as of mid-October), but they've been told to expect a shipment in couple of weeks.

EduCalc HP48 Programming Class

Over the past year, Richard Nelson at EduCalc along with long-time HP fan (and Goodies-Disk editor) Joseph Horn have been donating one night a week of their time to teach an HP48 programming class. According to Richard, the participants have ranged from all walks of life, including professionals, retirees and students. With each week's class generating a set of useful notes, they've accumulated these into a fair-sized book. So far, the chapters are: Getting Started, Structures, Commands, Problems, Routines & Algorithms, Mathematics, Articles, Graphics and Miscellaneous. EduCalc plans to offer this book to the general public in the coming weeks and it comes highly recommended to anyone interested in the details of HP48 programming.

Send in Those HP48 Box Flaps

There are only a few weeks remaining to send in the special HP coupon and HP48G- Series box flap in order to receive the free HP48 Serial Interface Kit. Anyone purchasing an HP48G or GX prior to the end of October is eligible for the free offer. Despite HP's claim that the wait for the good will be fairly long, many folks on the comp.sys.HP48 bulletin board have claimed that the turnaround time was on the order of three weeks.

Joe Horn Discovers G-Series Math is Better

In the past few days, Joseph Horn reported that doing matrix math on the HP48GX provided significantly higher precision results than the same operations on the HP48 SX. He cited examples in his article to prove his point, using the PC math utility, Derive, to check his answers. The Derive math was done to twenty decimal places in order to insure that the twelfth decimal place was correct.