Re: PIL-box w/o IL cable = paper weight Message #14 Posted by Christoph Giesselink on 24 Nov 2013, 8:05 p.m., in response to message #9 by Joe Horn
Quote:
Virtual tools don't read real LIF floppies. Now I can read real LIF floppies (boxes & boxes & boxes of 'em) on a real hardware 9114B using the PIL-box and a Windows 7 laptop.
You're absoluty correct. But when you're one of the late borns like me, you haven't tons of LIF discs in the drawer. So ftp://ftp.hpmuseum.org/lif/ is a treasure trove for this old software. And TNX for JFG's ILPer which give us access to these software and it doesn't matter if you want to load the software to real or emulated/similated hardware.
But when you confirm only on the old storage methods, you don't have to wonder why so may software and sources get lost over the years. Try to get source files or even the ROM images of the Pioneer family calculators made end of the eighties for example. Most of them are saved on media which got lost or are not readable any more...
I know from the early 49G time that you're not a fan of emulated calculators Joe, but many of the HP calculator emulators now have an integrated debugger which allows us a look to software internals and secrets we haven't dreamed 20 or 30 years ago.
So reading "HPX Exchange", "HP Journal", "PPC" or "Prisma" (German Computer Club), ... magazines from end of 80'ies most of these discussed topics can now be answered easily by looking into the decompiled sources or by execute them in a controlled environment by single step execution.
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