grahamf@hparc0.HP.COM (Graham Fraser) (04/02/91)
The following article from John McGechie will be in the next HPHH Melbourne Newsletter - April 1991 ___________________________________________________________________________ THE CONJECTURED EXISTENCE OF THE HP48 OPERATING SYSTEM Thanks to Jake Schwartz and Graham Fraser, Melbourne was briefly Chicago for many of us, Chicago in May, 1990, that is, for we have a full set of video tapes from the Chicago HP Handheld (or what-do-we-now-call-it,-do -you-suppose?) conference. Many of the names were familiar, and many of the faces and shapes too, from a few blurry photographs in the old PPC Journals, and I had had the good fortune to meet Cap'n Bob Bradley in Canberra years ago. The news from the distant HP frontier was all good. An extraordinary hand held, fully worthy successor, at last, to the HP41. (But I am ashamed to confess, after a good dinner, I went to sleep in the back row at one of those Chicago meetings.) But wait! How does it work? (Well, see, you press these buttons, and...) No, NO!! Where's the operating system? Well, that's in ROM? IS there an actual operating system? Was the system written by actual people? Yes, of course - see, this is the design team - Bill Wickes told us about the process, and - NUTS! The Liza Doolittle principle must operate in the sciences: don't speak of love, don't talk of what you feel - SHOW us. Personally, I suspect the whole thing. There are REALLY demons, trapped by the HP alchemists, stuffed with witchcraft in the '48, and made to paint the inside of the screen .... but to do so very, very quickly. (Bill Wickes used to be An Astral Physicist). Most HP handheld users know some maths. Most of them too, know of some non-existents in mathematics - no general algorithm to solve polynomials higher than quintics, no greatest prime number, no ruler and compass construction for a circle equal in area to a given square, no pairs of integers the square of whose ratio is equal to two, pi is not the root of any finite polynomial, and so on. These turn on proofs of non- existence. There are proofs of existence also in maths: of at least one transcendental number - eg pi, of a dissection of the surface of a sphere into parts which may be assembled into two spheres of the same size, of continuous curves with no tangents to any points, of proofs of theorems not yet (perhaps never to be) entertained, etc. One of the famous recently "proved" theorems in mathematics has been that of the four colour problem: that any map on a plane can be coloured by as few as four colours, with no boundary lying between regions with the same colour. The announcement of this proof caused a considerable fuss, since any proof has always been supposed to have to be humanly 'surveyable' - given the time, some mathematical wretch would have checked every step and confirmed that indeed the putative proof proves the putative theorem. The four colour proof involved a high speed computer check of thousands of cases, to many for any man to complete even in an extended lifetime. WAS there a proof of the theorem? HAD it been PROVED???? I checked the proof of Pythagoras' theorem when I learned (and loved) plane geometry as a teenager. By golly, THAT one is ok!!! There IS a proof of that - several of them, in fact. Those proofs exist, all right. (There I was The Wretch, or at least One of Them.) Has the HP48SX got an operating system? We found out from those video tapes (remember them, Lulu?) that no one of the collective of programmers/code writers, system designers had mastery of ALL of the code of the operating system. Between them, all had been read, all had been written, and it existed, anyway, only in memory (magnetic or electronic-holey) of an HP mainframe. There was no printout of it. Sure the HP48 runs. So did the HP71. I have its operating system in my shelves, a few feet away from where I type. That existed. But no ONE has SEEN, no ONE knows the HP48's system. It has no print out. If a bomb dropped on that HP computer, and there were no storages of that computer's data/hard discs, it would cease to reside in a readable form. We don't KNOW it exists. As for me, I'll back the screen-painting pixies. THEY, surely, are real honest-to-God Malmacronians? John (3324) McGechie (Formerly .Ed.) ___________________________________________________________________________