Philadelphia Area HP Handheld Club Meeting

Wednesday, March 9, 1994 - Drexel University

New EduCalc Catalog About to Ship

The next EduCalc catalog (#63) is beginning to ship this week. Several new plug-in cards are to be introduced from Sparcom and others. Check out Joseph Horn's article listing these later in this handout.

HP48 Programming Sessions Started

The Saturday morning HP48 programming class sessions started with February's PACS-Saturday at 11 AM. While this session covered preliminary topics such as stack manipulation, RPL versus RPN and the equation writer environment, the next session on 3/19 at 11 AM will delve into programming structures for looping, conditional tests, local and global variables etc. Hopefully, this will hold the interests of as well as benefit everyone who is attending the sessions.

Did You Get Your Old HP Calc?

EduCalc still has stocks of HP11C, HP16C, HP21S and HP27S calculators from a recent shipment of unused machines that Hewlett-Packard ran across in Corvallis. We understand that the HP15Cs which also came in that load are all sold out. The others are selling for 30 bucks apiece (without manual) except for the 11Cs which are 25 dollars. Get 'em while they're available.

New PDAs from Motorola and Apple

This past week, Motorola took the wraps off their new PDA, which is rather large (at 5 by 7 by 1.5 inches) and heavy (at around a pound and a half) and costly (at $1500.) as well. However, this one has 2 PCMCIA type II slots as well as a large LCD and two-way radio messaging built in. Apple, meanwhile, upgraded its Newton line with two models, the "100" and "110" with improved handwriting recognition software and a slimmer (but longer) case. Cost has remained under 700 dollars for the two units. Check out the PC Week articles later in this handout.

HP Omnibook 430 Debuts

A third member of the HP Omnibook family was introduced very recently. This one, the model 430, has the same 25 MHz 486 chip, but contains a 105-meg hard disk drive and moves Microsoft Word and Excel onto the hard drive (and thus out of system ROM).

Intel Rolls out DX4 and P54C CPUs

With the release this week of Intels new clock-tripled DX4 486 chips running at 75 and 100 MHz, as well as the new 3.3-volt P54C Pentium chips running at 90 MHz, the standard for PC's changes again. Already, companies like Zeos, Texas Instruments and NEC have introduced new machines based on the DX4 chips. Expect the prices of the DX2-66 machines to drop a good chunk of change over the next few months as a result. These new Intel chips appear to be the first response to the introduction of the IBM/Motorola Power 601 chip-based machines from Apple and IBM. It can only get more interesting.