Hewlett-Packard Calculators

Simulators

I have written Nonpareil, a microcode-level simulator for many older HP calculators. Nonpareil uses the GTK+ toolkit and runs on Linux/Posix/Unix platforms and Windows.

Obscure internal details of HP calculators

• memory sizes
• integrated circuits
• Voyager series speedup
• Voyager series hardware variants
• Hex tables of internal byte codes for user program steps:
  • HP-11C
  • HP-12C
  • HP-15C two-byte instructions
  • HP-16C
  • HP-29C
  • HP-34C
  • HP-38C
• HP-15C Synthetics by Allyn F. Tennant, originally published in PPC Calculator Journal V10 N1

Technical literature

I've found several United States Patents relating to HP calculators. I've typed in the abstracts of some of them, and I have PDF files of many.

I also have a bibliography of Hewlett-Packard Journal articles regarding HP calculators.

Speculation on future HP calculators

There has always been much speculation on Usenet about future HP calculators. In 1995 there were threads comparing the then-new TI-92 with the HP-48. I posted a short article expressing my opinion of the technology issues that I expected to shape future HP calculators.

In late 2003, HP introduced the HP-49G+, which uses an ARM processor core and runs Saturn code in simulation. Low-level portions of the calculator software have been migrated to native ARM code, and more may be migrated in future releases.

Other HP calculators introduced in the recent years have used off-the-shelf hardware designs. Many of these, particularly at the low end, have apparently been designed by other companies for OEM use by HP.

Links:

Although I have at least one of each of the HP 38G, 39G, 40G, 48S/SX/G/GX and 49G models, other people have already provided much more information and software for these models on the Web than I could ever hope to. I recommend starting with hpcalc.org.

For HP 38G/39G/40G/48S/SX/G/GX/49G emulation under Windows, look at:

• The Emu48 Offical Homepage by Sébastien Carlier, the author
• unofficial patches to Emu48 by Christoph Gießelink

The following are links to information about other HP calculators:

• HP Calculators, from the source
• David Hicks' Museum of HP Calculators
• Eric Rechlin's hpcalc.org
• Craig Finseth's HPDATABase
• The Hewlett Packard Calculator Page by Rick Furr
• Old HP and TI Calculators by Gene Wright
• Warren Furlow's HP-41 page
• Jean-Daniel Dodin's web page including PPC-T (Toulouse) material
• The HP HOME view by Colin Croft, lots of information about the HP 38G, HP 39G, and HP 40G
• The 71b Resource Page by Andy Delano
• emu71

Last updated 9 December 2007 Copyright 1995-2001, 2003-2005, 2007 Eric Smith

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