HP Forum Archive 09

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xhpcalc - another HP calculator discontinued... Message #1 Posted by Britt Snodgrass on 6 Dec 2002, 10:24 p.m. HP recently discontinued another of my favorite calculators: xhpcalc. xhpcalc is a tri-mode (SCI, FIN, PROG) X-windows simulation of HP-11C/12C/16C that HP bundled with the HP-UX (Unix) operating system on their HP 9000 series workstation. See http://devrsrc1.external.hp.com/STK/impacts/i188.html Why discontinue something like this? I found a HP workstation at my office today that still has HP-UX 10.20 so I could run xhpcalc remotely and have it display on my desktop PC. Clicking the HP logo in the upper right corner makes it cycle through the three modes (keypad faces). xhpcalc, as a genuine HP product, is certainly worthy of a hpmuseum exhibit. Does anyone have a contact at HP who might be convinced to freely release the source code under some suitable license or at least build and release a free binary for Linux on x86? Britt

Re: xhpcalc - another HP calculator discontinued... Message #2 Posted by Renato on 7 Dec 2002, 2:27 p.m., in response to message #1 by Britt Snodgrass There is a manual at: http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~mac/manuals/hpux-manual-pages/hpux/usr/man/man1/xhpcalc.1.html This simulator is not listed in the museum simulator pages. Can you post a screenshot ?

Re: xhpcalc - another HP calculator discontinued... Message #3 Posted by Vassilis Prevelakis on 8 Dec 2002, 9:02 a.m., in response to message #2 by Renato Here is a screenshot of another HP calulator. This one runs on the HP Integral PC, a lunchbox sized Unix workstation with an electroluminescent screen (that is why the picture has an orange colour). Notice that the function keys on the bottom of the screen are used to redefine the top left group of 10 keys. The calculator as shown is in Trig mode (you can see the asterisk next to the F2 label), but by pressing (say) the F3 key you can enable the Statistics functions. The key labels will change to reflect the new functions. More information on the HP IPC may be found in http://www.coho.org/~pete/IPC/integral.html. **vp

Re: xhpcalc - another HP calculator discontinued... Message #4 Posted by Renato on 8 Dec 2002, 9:18 p.m., in response to message #3 by Vassilis Prevelakis This one looks like a character mode program. Is that so ? What is the name of the sw? IMO it deserves to be listed in the museum. Maybe if you send man page and some information to the museum, it may be listed in the simulations page.

Re: xhpcalc - another HP calculator discontinued... Message #5 Posted by Vassilis Prevelakis on 9 Dec 2002, 3:51 a.m., in response to message #4 by Renato This is all the documentation there is: HPCalc. This is the standard HPCalc program that we used to sell. Also a very nice implementation, and it should be self-explanatory to operate. (If you store HPCalc on another disc, make sure you store all its "dot" - invisible - files with it, (.HPCalc.fnt and .HPCalc.hlp). You can find these dot files using the "ls -a" command (ls is on your CommandsI disc). HPCalc will not run without these associated 'dot' files. The program has on-line help, but apart from changing the display mode (FIX, SCI, etc) the rest is rather intuitive. To seems to me that the command to change the display mode has given the HP engineers a lot of headaches, since they were always changing it. E.g. on the earlier models (HP 67, 97), there was a mode key (FIX, SCI, ENG) and a DSP key that defined the number of displayed digits. Then that number was made an argument to the mode command (e.g. FIX 2 on the HP 41C). There were also variations like the HP 21 where DSP 2 would select SCI 2 and DSP . 2 would select FIX 2). The HPCalc adopts yet another approach where DSP 2 selects FIX 2 and DSP EEX 2 selects SCI 2. (Yes I had to use the on-line help to find this). **vp

Re: xhpcalc - another HP calculator discontinued... Message #6 Posted by Vassilis Prevelakis on 9 Dec 2002, 3:59 a.m., in response to message #4 by Renato Oops I forgot: Renato wrote: > This one looks like a character mode program. Is that so? character mode? As in it runs on an ASCII terminal? In this case the answer is no, as you can see from the screendump, it uses the GUI interface. > What is the name of the sw? HPCalc for the HP Integral Pesronal Computer (IPC). As you can see in my previous posting HP were initially selling this program, but in the end they gave up and bundled it with a free OS upgrade diskette. **vp

Re: xhpcalc - another HP calculator discontinued... Message #7 Posted by Britt Snodgrass on 9 Dec 2002, 11:13 a.m., in response to message #2 by Renato I would post a screenshot but I'm not sure how to post it to this forum. I'll ask if I can get is added to the simulation page somehow. As far as I know, xhpcalc was never sold. HP included the executable file with their HP-UX (workstation Unix) operating system and it never ran on anything else. Now that they have dropped it in HP-UX 11.00, I'd like to ask if they would release the source code so it could be ported to any OS with an X-Windows server (Linux, FreeBSD, M$Windows+cygwin, etc.) Britt (b r i t t @ a c m . o r g)

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