HP Forum Archive 21

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HP-71b questions Message #1 Posted by jerome ibanes on 29 June 2013, 6:41 p.m. Quite a few years back, before my exposure to HP calculators, I've used a Casio FX-850P, which I found, then, to be a great calculator; mostly because of its integrated basic (which, truth being said, not outstanding, but still great for a 12 years old). As one might expect, I used it for just about anything, as an organizer, databank, and, of course, portable computer (even had a few games on it). I liked the horizontal keyboard, which was very usable, along with its formatting (qwerty); that was a big plus. I was wondering which HP calculator would be closest to the FX-850P, I seem to believe it would be the HP-71b, but I could be wrong on this. Maybe the HP-200lx (I don't want to raise flames here, I know this is mostly a RPL forum). Today, I do mostly everything on either my 48gx or 50g (migrating to the 50g because of failing memory cards on the 48gx). One of the obvious disadvantage I could foresee with the 71b would be its 1-line display, but again, because I never had exposure to this, I wouldn't know; hence I ask.

Re: HP-71b questions Message #2 Posted by Keith Midson on 30 June 2013, 2:08 a.m., in response to message #1 by jerome ibanes Hi Jerome, The 71B is the closest in the sense that it is programmable in Basic. Other HP's were programmable in RPL or (in the case of the 95LX, 100LX and 200LX) DOS. Cheers, Keith

Re: HP-71b questions Message #3 Posted by Garth Wilson on 30 June 2013, 3:19 a.m., in response to message #2 by Keith Midson The 71's BASIC, especially with the Math module and a lot of Language-EXtension (LEX) files added by the users' groups (and add the JPC and other ROMs if you like), made it by far the best BASIC I've ever seen. After I got familiar with it, I got into Rocky Mountain BASIC 5.1 which HP used on the bigger computers for instrumentation and control, and I was very, very disappointed with the latter. Edited: 30 June 2013, 3:20 a.m.

Re: HP-71b questions Message #4 Posted by Maximilian Hohmann on 30 June 2013, 6:58 a.m., in response to message #3 by Garth Wilson Quote: After I got familiar with it, I got into Rocky Mountain BASIC 5.1 which HP used on the bigger computers for instrumentation and control, and I was very, very disappointed with the latter. Really? I have the fondest memories of RMB. I used it for a couple of years around 1990 for microwave measurements in the lab. With only a dozen straightforward lines of BASIC code, you could control your measurement equipment, collect the data and apply calibration and pre-processing formulas to huge vectors/arrays of double-precision-complex data without a single type declaration or the need to specify array dimensions. It was very stable (some measurements took a whole weekend and it never crashed once) and fast.

Re: HP-71b questions Message #5 Posted by Marcus von Cube, Germany on 30 June 2013, 5:16 a.m., in response to message #1 by jerome ibanes Jerome, have a look at my BASIC Comparison Sheet which compares different BASIC dialects for pocket computers (and some of their larger relatives.)

Re: HP-71b questions Message #6 Posted by jerome ibanes on 30 June 2013, 8:00 p.m., in response to message #5 by Marcus von Cube, Germany Thank you all, this is great info.

Re: HP-71b questions Message #7 Posted by Namir on 1 July 2013, 5:03 p.m., in response to message #5 by Marcus von Cube, Germany Good to find out that you updated this valuable document. I collect pocket computers that program in legacy BASIC and find this document to provide a most valuable summary. Namir

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