Asking HP to open source HP calculator software and patents

[Jim Horn]

When the HP-110 Portable was on the market, Sam Chau, a fellow enthusiast/HP engineer modified his to have nearly twice the standard RAM. We asked for an in-house unsupported copy of the firmware source so we could modify it to use the increased RAM (the -110 let you partition it between user RAM and a RAM disk). After a month we heard back that the source code disks had been inadvertently used for another project and erased so the source code no longer existed.

Sam ended up writing a driver to treat the added RAM as another RAM disk. But the loss of source was an unpleasant surprise.