Philadelphia Area HP Handheld Club Meeting | Thursday, June 18, 1998

New HP Palmtop Is An Enhanced HP620LX

This month, HP announced the HP660LX Windows CE palmtop PC. It appears to be a 620LX which has been upgraded with 32 meg of RAM and bundled with a 56K modem. The price is $999.00 list and the 620LX’ price was dropped to $799. at the same time as the announcement.

HP Handheld Conference Beginning to Take Shape

Despite the late start, it looks like the HP Conference in August is shaping up. Below is the latest publicity information as prepared by Richard Nelson and Megha Shyam:

  • Hand Held Computing - Conference 1998

    You are invited to come to the conference, share your ideas, meet veterans in the field and have fun. Hewlett-Packard's Australian Calculator Operation (ACO) has been invited to send representatives to the conference along with some veterans of the calculator group from Corvallis.

    Dates: Saturday and Sunday August 29 & 30, 1998.

    Conference Site: The Hewlett-Packard site at Vancouver, WA.

    Logistical details will be forthcoming.

    A catered dinner is being planned for Saturday evening. Details will be announced in mid July.

    *** No Parallel Sessions ***

    The conference is sponsored by Handheld Computing, Inc., a non-profit foundation designed to provide educational forums on hand held computing.

  • A Preliminary Speaker List HHC98 As of May 21, 1998:

    No. Speaker Topic

    1. Bill Wickes Where is Handheld computing headed?
    2. Megha Shyam TBD - Managing Software Development?
    3. Richard J. Nelson Managing Tabular Data on the HP48
    4. Ted J. Kerber Producing an HP48 PC Font
    5. Vern Lindsay The New PLDL200 Data Logger
    6. Jake Schwartz CD ROMs of past calculator publications
    7. Joseph Horn The latest HP48 goodies Discs
    8. Jim Donnelly Interfacing To a Laser Distance Instrument
    9. Wlodek Mier-Jedrzejowicz TBD
    10. Jean-Yves Avenard (HP ACO) TBD

     

    Check out http://www.handheld.org for additional information on the conference.

    PPC CD-ROM Set Progress

    As some people are aware, I have been working since late February on a CD-ROM set consisting of the following calculator publications:

    Disk 1:

    Disk 2:

    The scanning of the issues is complete up to and including the HPX Exchange issues, covering roughly 5520 pages of material. I have original copies of the HP Key Notes and the HP Journal issues, but only have photocopies of the HP65 Keynotes. Jim Horn has promised to lend me his original copies of those eight issues for scanning purposes. If the second disk has a significant amount of space available and time permits (prior to the HP Handheld Conference in late August), I might add other items to the disk (such as the eight issues of the HP Calculator Digest). Time will tell. Copies of the disk sets will be made and distributed (for free) to attendees of the conference, and sets will be sold for low cost thereafter. I have set up a web page covering this project. It is located at

    http://www.waterw.com/~jake-s/ppccdrom.htm. Here is a portion of that page:

    The PPC CD-ROM Set: A Work in Progress

    PPC, formerly the HP65 Users Club, was formed in June of 1974 to support user-exchange of information related to

    Hewlett-Packard Personal Programmable Calculators. PPC published a newsletter, originally called 65 NOTES; later later the PPC Journal or the PPC Calculator Journal, roughly 8 to 10 times per year from 1974 through 1987. It also produced the PPC Computer Journal, covering HP 70-series and 80-series computers, published in parallel with the PPC Calculator Journal from 1982 through 1984 (and then both calculator and computer coverage was merged back into the PPC Journal starting in 1985).

     

    CHHU, the Club of Hewlett-Packard Handheld Users, started in 1984 and published the CHHU Chronicle between 1984 and 1986. Also, HPX, the Handheld Program Exchange, picked up after CHHU ceased operation and published the HPX Exchange between 1987 and 1990.

     

    The above newsletters comprise ovedr 5500 pages of valuable material covering all aspects of HP handhelds from the HP35 up to the HP28S.


    A set of CD-R disks is being prepared which will contain all of the pages of the above newsletters plus:

    Currently, it is planned that this will be a two-disk set with:

    Disk 1 consisting of 65 NOTES/PPC Calculator Journals Volume 1 through Volume 13 (4300+ pages);

    Disk 2 consisting of PPC Calculator Journal Volume 14; PPC Computer Journal; CHHU Chronicle;

  • HPX Exchange, HP Key Notes & HP Journal articles (1000+ pages)

  • The current plan is to introduce the disks at the 1998 HP Handheld Conference in Vancouver, Washington

    on August 29-30. At least 25 sets (and possibly as many as 50) will be made available for free to the first

    25-50 conference registrants. They will be sold for a low fee (on the order of $20.00 per set) thereafter.

    Information regarding the 1998 HP Handheld Conference may be found at:

    http://www.handheld.org on the web.


    What the disks are and what they are not....

    The disks are a reference tool, with all pages scanned images in Adobe Acrobat format. Navigation buttons within each newsletter will provide movement from page to page, issue to issue, volume to volume and from any issue in any volume to any other. All indexes which were provided in the pages of the newsletters are included. Some of them have their entries hyperlinked to the referenced articles (as this is being done as time permits). Pages of text and diagrams will print approximately as cleanly as the originally scanned pages, and may be viewed within Acrobat Reader magnified up to 800 percent of original. All issues which start with a table of contents on page one have this T.O.C. hyperlinked to the articles themselves.

    The disks are not a single-source search mechanism to find information on subjects entered by the user. This would require indexing all the material (which would be perhaps a lifetime project since type fonts, sizes and printing quality varies from article to article and page to page, causing OCR software to choke). They also are not a library of downloadable software. The listings are there, and you may therefore key them in. Also, it is likely that the supplied barcode for many of the programs in the issues will not print of high enough quality to be scanned with an HP41 wand. (Increasing the scanning resolution above 300dpi to achieve this would reduce the amount of material which would fit on the disks. Bring on DVD-R!!!)


    The future of the PPC CD-ROM set:

    Many additional ideas have been proposed for future disks in the set, such as:

    Only spare time will determine which of these are possible.

     

    Check out Jim Lawson’s latest product/price sheet from Handi-Calc, later in this handout. Also check out the palmtop comparison article from Info World, the Meta Kernel ad sheet from Calculating Edge, the HP48 Programming Class notes from Richard Nelson and the press release of Sony’s second-generation digital still cameras based on floppy disks.

     

    Last Month's Article Next Month's Article Back to PAHHC Page