Re: HP 71B arrived Message #5 Posted by Garth Wilson on 16 May 2012, 12:56 p.m., in response to message #4 by Mike Morrow
Quote: I own an HP-71B (2548A....). IMHO, it is one of the most unusable items in the collection that I've built since 1976. It doesn't even do RPN! Even if one could find some use for it as a device controller (which isn't a "handheld" usage), it's hard to imagine much functional value above that of a HP-41CX with HP-IL.
The 71 is a hand-held computer, and not very practical as a calculator. For a calculator today I use my 41, except when I need to do a lot of complex-number operations which the 41 can do but is clumsy at without the 41Z module which I will get in a NoV-64 when my employer gets caught up on paying me! (That's important with a son finishing up in a private college and I want him to graduate witout debt.) I definitely prefer RPN.
I have two 71's (the backup having been nearly free NOS before eBay existed), and used the 71 constantly from 1986 to 1992. It is far more powerful than a 41 (and its HPIL is about 35 times as fast as the 41's), but much of its power was lacking if you only have the mainframe. What added so much, beyond the HPIL, math, and Forth/Assembler modules from HP, was the LEX files from the user groups, and the large third-party memory modules (up to 128KB of RAM in a single module from CMT, and there was even a company that would hard-wire 256KB RAM inside so it didn't take any ports). With these, I constantly typed memos and other things on it with a full-featured editor I wrote taking advantage of the many LEX files from Paris published in the CHHU Chronicle, optimizing it to be nimble with the tiny display (even though I also had the 80-column video for it), and I could type at 30wpm on the tiny keyboard as much as I wanted without any worries of running out of memory. (I type at 60wpm on a full-sized keyboard.) I did calculations on arrays of up to 16,384 points, and control functions on the workbench, some of which the 41 was hopelessly slow for.
I did like the handheld size of the 71 as a controller, because before the days of real laptops, I could easily unplug the HPIL cables to free it up to go from the workbench to my desk and back, and, at the end of the day, put it in a corner of my attache case to take home and work on things there, even more practically than a modern laptop-- if you don't need graphics (which I did not).
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