Philadelphia Area HP Handheld Club Meeting

Wednesday, June 15, 1994 Drexel University

New EduCalc Catalog On the Way

The next EduCalc catalog (#64) will begin to ship this week. The cover features the new Hewlett-Packard Omnibook model 530. This is the first unit containing an Intel processor (483-33), a standard external floppy drive (connected via PCMCIA) and external color monitor support. It also sports a plug-in 130-meg hard drive.

Dutch Conference Postponed Until October

Exactly one week prior to the May 28th conference in Amsterdam, I received a phone call from Rick Grevelle. He had just read a posting on Usenet which announced the cancellation of the Dutch conference, which just about floored me. (See a copy of this posting later in this handout.) To make a long story short, the PROMPT group had less than half the number of registrations to allow them to break even financially. Unfortunately, they waited much too long to make the decision to postpone their event. The result was that the conference ended up becoming an informal meeting to ask the question, "Where did we go wrong?" This four-hour affair consisted of the PROMPT conference committee, a few regular Dutch members and me.

HP48 "Upgrade Program" Comes to a Close

Finally, after numerous Usenet postings by people who received poor treatment from HP's customer support, saying that HP "never heard of an upgrade program", a posting finally appeared with the facts. In mid March, Cary McCallister of HP enumerated what had to be said and who had to be contacted in order to have a machine upgraded to ROM version R. This was not handled by usual customer support, and indeed they intentionally had not even notified the customer support people about the program. A copy of the posting is included elsewhere in these pages.

HP48 Programming Contest Version Two

The second annual HP48 programming contest is to be held in conjunction with the Summer Consumer Electronics Show special HP users' meeting in Chicago on June 24th. On June 15th, Richard Nelson posted on EduCalc's Newsline (714-582-3976) the problem to be solved on HP48 S and G-series machines. The shortest, fastest program which correctly solves the stated problem is the winner of an HP48G (ROM Rev. R) machine. The details of the problem are included in this handout, and one need not be present at the Chicago meeting in order to win; just the program must be delivered to the Chicago CHIP group or to Richard by June 24th.

Summer CES Around the Corner

The Summer Consumer Electronics Show makes its last stop in Chicago this year between June 23rd and June 25th at McCormick Place. It will be a reduced-size show due to the many traditionally large audio/video exhibitors pulling out in favor of the Winter Las Vegas shows in January. However, the roster shows more and more of the software and handheld/wireless device-oriented exhibitors in the recent years. Of course, it is already known that next year's show will be May 11-13 in Philly at the recently built Pennsylvania Convention Center. It is highly likely that some of the Chicago folks as well as Richard Nelson will be planning on making the trek to our area for CES, and thus we should begin thinking about sponsoring a special HP users' meeting in our back yard in May of 1995. A full-fledged conference in by no means necessary (as Craig Finseth is currently planning to do one in the Minneapolis area some time in 1995), but a nice meeting place fairly near Center City would be a good thing to think about. If anyone has ideas on a place where a group between 10 and 50 could meet from dinner time until the wee hours of the morning, please let me know.

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