stevev@greylady.uoregon.edu (Steve VanDevender) (02/20/91)
A friend of mine and I are looking for Bill Wickes's HYDE library for the HP-48. If anyone knows where this is archived or can mail it to me in \->ASC form, please send me e-mail. I got my HP-48 (rev. E, serial number starting with 3104) with a 128K RAM card and a serial cable a couple of weeks ago, and I am mightily impressed. I've been tempted to buy one ever since they were announced, but because of financial considerations didn't get around to ordering one until January. I also didn't mind waiting so I could get the latest revision. Mostly I got my 48 as a hacking toy, since I am no longer a student and don't really need all the symbolic math stuff, even though my programming job may actually let me put some of it to use. What really attracted me to the 48 was the idea of a pocket computer with a real programming language, graphics, and the ability to do machine language programming built in--I guess I'm just a hacker to the core. Having the built-in I/O is absolutely wonderful--I have rather sadly retired my HP-41, but the 48 is just as good as an alarm clock and even better at being a notepad for phone numbers, unmeasurably easier to program, and I can back it up and download software for it far more easily than I could on my 41. It's been about 12 years since I started working with computers, and it's amazing and amusing to me that I can now own a hand-held computer that's cheaper and more powerful than the computers I learned on. Although I could always want more, I am thoroughly impressed by the design of the 48 and satisfied with the design trade-offs that were made. Although I rarely give unrestrained praise, I heartily congratulate all the people at HP who designed the HP-48 for making another of the few computing dream machines. There. That ought to balance out all the complaining for a while :-). -- Steve VanDevender stevev@greylady.uoregon.edu "Bipedalism--an unrecognized disease affecting over 99% of the population. Symptoms include lack of traffic sense, slow rate of travel, and the classic, easily recognized behavior known as walking."