A newcomer from France (edited)

[Mark]

(01-06-2015 07:37 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  

(01-06-2015 06:44 PM)Mark Wrote:  Hello, and a happy new year to everyone,

As a newly registered member, I would like to introduce myself : I have been visiting the HP museum since 1996, regularly peeking at the forum. To say the least, reading you all is very instructive, I learn a lot...

Welcome Mark, thanks for the introduction and background, quite similar to many of us, especially the "I collect them" part.

It has been my experience, echoed by many others, that you will get far more out of these forums by participating, than merely by reading. Do not fear that you may make a small mistake, we all do on occasion, and as you've likely seen, someone will jump in with a correction in no time.

Hope to see your comments soon.

Hello Bob,

Thank you very much for your reply ! It makes me remember about a very beautiful sentence I read on a French forum which said "Knowledge grows up provided it is shared". ("la Connaissance s'accroit quand on la partage")

So, here's a few more about me : Already as a kid I dismantled everything I grabbed, I've always wanted to know what goes on under the hood. To me, calculators and computers are especially amazing since they're the only machines in which we can -literally- embed some part of of our mental processes.

Among my heroes are Isaac Newton, Charles Babbage, Nikola Tesla, Alan Turing, and so on... as a student, days after being given that broken HP21 by a friend, I discovered in the classroom the HP9100 that my IT teacher had teared into pieces because it stopped working. I was astonished : a calculator made up of discrete components ! What a wonder. To the others it was just junk, those were the microprocessor days.

I was able to get some boards (ROM, microcode, flip-flops...) which I preciously keep, and I'm still dreaming of a complete machine. I've read the Osborne patents again and again, and so many other patents. All of that definitely triggered what I'm still doing : trying to preserve whatever I can. That's why HP calculators were the first I collected, soon to be joined by TI, Casio, Sharp, Odhner, Friden... and now slide rules :-)

My favorite HP is -err, not so easy ! Is it the 9810, or the 67 -and what about the 11C, and the 25 ? They're all special :-) as are the other brands.

...and, speaking of what's going on under the hood : "to better understand it, build it". The 6502 RPN homemade calculator I'm working on is based on Charles R. Bond floating-point library (first tribute) and the hardware I built with great help from Garth Wilson 6502 site (second tribute). The 80's technology is attractive because you can control each single bit. -please forgive me, I'm away from HP.

Some of my friends say I'm nuts, now you understand why. I'd rather say I'm assembly-twisted :-)

Marc