Re: 9810 works, briefly Message #4 Posted by David Ramsey on 9 July 2011, 12:27 p.m., in response to message #3 by BobVA
Well, I probably won't get time to work on the short issue for a week or so, but here are some photos anyway. First, the 2011 quail chicks:
I catch and release quail chicks in my yard every year. The little buggers can run like lighting and make inertialess 90-degree turns. Considering I'm 55, I'm kinda proud I can still catch 'em.
What? Oh, the 9810! Well, the first thing I noticed was when I removed the printer paper:
Yeah, that's going to be a LOT of fun to clean up internally. The card reader, on the other hand, will be easier:
As you can see from this slightly blurry photo, the drive rollers have turned to some crumbly brown material.
The edges of the circuit boards, on the other hand, are pristine. Is this gold plating?
The keyboard/X register has one digit with two dead segments. I don't suppose these LEDs are still made...?
Here's another shot of the display...
Here it is in program mode. I have a simple little program I use to do basic functional testing; it calculates how long it would take to fly a ship from here to Pluto (using 3.7e9 miles as the distance) assuming it could accelerate at 1g halfway then decelerate the remainder. On an HP-67, this program takes several seconds to run. On an HP-41, it takes just under 2 seconds. On the 9810, it's instantaneous.
The primitive version of RPN is confusing: having the result of an operation end up in the Y register is weird; you have to roll the result down to X to perform a subsequent unary operation.
Here are the options the calculator came with.
The exterior of the machine is quite battered: stains, chips in paint and plastic, and so forth. I won't try any cosmetic restoration, though: it has earned its stripes, as it were.
I would like to get a math module, because it feels weird to have an HP calculator without transcendentals. I will also eventually repair the printer and card reader, and although I have Katie's writeup on the latter, I have nothing on the former.
Also, I have no mag cards. Maybe Katie will sell me one or two.
Edited: 15 July 2011, 4:20 p.m. after one or more responses were posted
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