some research on the meaning of "PPC"
Message #1 Posted by Ellis Easley on 9 Apr 2003, 6:38 a.m.
I have a PPC publication, "HP-41 HP-IL System Dictionary" and its copyright page says "Copyright 1982 Personal Programming Center, Inc." I also looked at the PPC ROM Manual on the Museum CD-ROMs, it doesn't have a copyright page per se but has a small notice that just says "Copyright PPC 1981". Then I remembered that the PPC Journal was originally called "65 Notes" (for the HP65, the first HP programmable handheld). I looked at the last issue of "65 Notes" (V4N10, Dec.1977) on Jake Schwartz' CD-ROM and it has a letter attached (on pages before the newsletter page 1 on the CD-ROM) about the need for the club to grow. In it Richard Nelson makes the following suggestions:
"1. Change The Club Name: At the present time, I favor PPC. The letters don't stand for anything special. They could mean Personal Programmer Club or Personal and Profitable Computing, or whatever ...
2. Change The Club Publication: Call it PPC Journal."
The next issue, V5N1, Jan.-Feb.1978, is called PPC Journal and under the logo in small letters it says:
"The Personal Programmers Club does Prolific and Productive Computing with Hewlett-Packard Personal Programmable Calculators." (with the capital letters "P,P,C" underlined)
The words "Personal Programmable Calculators" with underlined letters is repeated in a footnote at the bottom of the page.
The title of the Journal was changed to "PPC Calculator Journal" with V7N1, Jan.1980. It was explained as a step towards possibly splitting off another newsletter for computers, since the HP85 had just been released. The small letters under the logo were changed a little at this time, with the third combination becoming " ... Hewlett-Packard Personal Programmables from Corvallis.", perhaps because the handhelds were built in Corvallis, Oregon while the desktop systems were built at a factory in Colorado?
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