HP-41 Standard Module - was there ever a plan to include it in box ?

[Allen]

I don't know for sure, but the language on page 2 of the manual suggests they meant the book to be a learning aid, not just on keying in a program, but for writing programs in general. Pedagogically, HP suggested in page 2 that learning is improved by studying existing code. As such, they offered program listings for study, not necessarily for plug-and-play use.

While the program listings and description are perfectly adequate, I have seen nothing that surpasses the the PPC ROM manual and program listings for learning clever programming techniques.

I suspect HP later made the actual STANDARD module based on 1 or more of these motivations:

1. make money selling another module (why not?)
2. they had available space on the ROM manufacturing line and needed to fill it to maintain production in between higher margin ROM's
3. user feedback based on frustration/errors made trying to key in 100-200 step programs with no available checksum.
   

Caveat emptor ,I could be wrong on all points.