Category Archives: Software I’ve written

Nonpareil progress

Posted on December 11, 2005 by Eric

There hasn’t been much to report on Nonpareil development lately. I haven’t had much time to spend on it, but I have made some progress. Most notably: I came up with a scheme to fake the Woodstock pointer wrap behavior … Continue reading →

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BOUNCY, a silly programming language

Posted on December 5, 2005 by Eric

After thinking about it for many years, I finally started writing a spec and a proof-of-concept implementation for my 2-D control flow programming language BOUNCY. The code isn’t yet ready for release, and there will be some further changes and … Continue reading →

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Nonpareil: improved KML keyboard mapping support

Posted on November 13, 2005 by Eric

A Nonpareil user asked about keyboard mapping for the 41C/CV/CX ON, USER, PRGM, ALPHA, shift (gold), SST, and R/S keys. All keyboard mappings are user-configurable in the KML file, but setting them properly is tricky. Until now, you had to … Continue reading →

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la2vcd support for newer Agilent logic analyzers

Posted on October 28, 2005 by Eric

Apparently some Agilent logic analyzers (such as the 1682A) will dump data in CSV (comma-separated value) files, rather than a separate file per signal as the old HP 16500B does. My la2vcd program, which converts the logic analyzer dumped data … Continue reading →

Posted in Hardware, la2vcd | Leave a comment

I was voted best speaker at the HHC 2005 conference!

Posted on September 18, 2005 by Eric

I was astounded to discover that I was voted best speaker at the HHC 2005 conference which wrapped up today in Chicago. I gave two presentations, one on the last year’s work on Nonpareil, and one on the calculator prototype … Continue reading →

Posted in Calculators, Nonpareil | 2 Comments

New program “edit33″

Posted on September 14, 2005 by Eric

The DEC PDP-1 computer at the Computer History Museum has a Type 30 Precision CRT Display with a Type 33 Symbol Generator. The Type 33 allows the computer to more quickly display small symbols (typically characters) using a five by … Continue reading →

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New Voyager calculator images for Nonpareil

Posted on September 10, 2005 by Eric

Maciej Bartosiak emailed me a new set of PNG image files for the Voyager calculators (HP-11C, HP-12C, HP-15C, HP-16C) which look even nicer, so they will be in the next release.

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Reading HP 9144 cartridge tapes

Posted on August 29, 2005 by Eric

Al and I urgently needed a way to read old HP 9144 cartridge tapes. These are mechanically standard DC600 or DC615 tapes, but have an HP-unique format. Al hooked up a PC with an IEEE-488 interface card, and I voluneered … Continue reading →

Posted in Retrocomputing, Software I've written | 2 Comments

Spice calculator ROMs

Posted on July 12, 2005 by Eric

There were some ROMs shared between the 67 and 97, and between the 19C and 29C, which is not surprising because those were pairs of printing and non-printing machines that were otherwise nearly identical. And there are certainly many code … Continue reading →

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Nonpareil on Windows

Posted on June 27, 2005 by Eric

Nonpareil now runs on Windows, as well as Linux and other Posix platforms. Nonpareil is cross-compiled from Linux using a GCC cross-compiler targeting i586-mingw32msvc. There is not yet an installer; it’s just distributed as a ZIP file. It appears that … Continue reading →

Posted in Calculators, Nonpareil | Leave a comment