Jake-S@cup.portal.com (Jake G Schwartz) (11/19/90)
Just wanted to mention a few things related to HP toys.... I just finished copying the 57th copy of the Chicago CHIP Group's HP Handheld User's Conference tape from June of 1990. This equals the number of attendees who were actually present at the conference itself, which is an impressive amount of interest for a calculator. Exactly ten years before that conference, in the exact same facility was held the first Chicago-based HP handheld conference. One speaker at that affair was Bill Wickes, who spoke for the first time (as far as I know) on synthetic programming on the HP41C to an audience larger than his own local (Washington D.C. area) PPC chapter. His talk won him the "best speaker" award, and got HP's attention as well. Dave Conklin (then of the Corvallis division, and one of the chief writers of the HP41's 12K operating system) represented HP and spoke of a new HP product, the barcode wand. The evening before the formal conference, and the evening afterward, approximately a dozen of us (myself, Richard Nelson, Jack Stout, Bill W., Ron Johnson and others) gathered in Jack Stout's basement (or garage, depending on how bad the mosquitoes were biting that evening) and exchanged HP41 magnetic cards and played with all sorts of stuff. Bill Kolb was passing around an HP41 Service Module (which he had accidently received in his calculator when it was returned from Corvallis having been serviced) which raised some eyebrows. Bill Wickes was playing with the newly-discovered "Q-loader" instruction, which did some funny things with the HP41's Q- register and also reversed the order of the characters in function names. Some of us were drawing bar codes by hand with black felt-tip markers, trying to get synthetic characters to appear on the HP41 display. Jim DeArras was reading byte values aloud so Ron Johnson could key them into his new HP85 and produce HP41 barcodes on the '85's thermal printer. It was an exciting time..... Approximately ten years ago this week or so, Bill released his "Synthetic Programming on the HP41C" book, and the world of synthetics really started to catch fire. That book went through many printings and in several lang- uages before the momentum began to die down. Several other authors followed with more S.P. books and additional HP41 advanced applications texts, but as far as I know, Bill's was the first (and probably most famous). Bill went to work for HP's Corvallis division the following year and has helped shape the way HP calculators have progressed in many aspects since 1981. The keen interest shown here (in the HP28 and HP48) is testimony to his significant contributions to the state of the art in handheld computing devices. Thanks, Bill, for ten years of effort from which we've all benefited. Jake Schwartz
billw@hpcvra.cv.hp.com.CV.HP.COM (William C Wickes) (11/20/90)
Aw, shucks. Thanks Jake, a tribute from a rational enthusiast like you is much appreciated. And one of the great things about the calculator experience over the last dozen years is the way it has brought so many of us with different interests and scattered locations together into a dynamic community. Bill Wickes