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Thanks for asking. Yes, the calculator itself was the first "computer" that I owned, and there was nothing else to connect it to, or to emulate it with. (I ha
by anonymousiam 1y ago
Thanks for asking. Yes, the calculator itself was the first "computer" that I owned, and there was nothing else to connect it to, or to emulate it with. (I had my own PDP-11 at work, and I had previously done batch-mode programming on an IBM 370.) I bought my 41C in 1979 (made in the US!), and spent several thousand dollars on peripherals over a period of about three years. It was a big investment in a platform that did not interoperate with anything else, and I ended up giving it all away. I didn't keep any of it, including all the programs I had written and stored on magnetic cards (a fine example of extinct storage media).
I may still have a spiral notebook, in which I did all of the code development. It would be a hard-copy of all the code I wrote. If I do still have it, I have no idea where it is. It sort of reminds me of the end of Citizen Kane.
Later on, I also got rid of my Synertek SYM-1 and all my CP/M platforms, except for one IMSAI 8080 S-100 box, which I eventually gave away to someone else. I didn't realize at the time (nearly 30 years ago) that the IMSAI 8080 was quite collectable, and was going for about $800 on eBay. Still, I didn't regret it much.
The old systems evoke a sympathetic nostalgia, but actually using them is an exercise in patience, and eventually evokes a desire for more modern systems.
I've still got some emulated retro hardware and some old software emulators, but I don't really use them much.
- johnea 1y agoTo this day, I still use a linux desktop simulator for the HP-41CX calculator! The original website seems now offline: https://nonpareil.brouhaha.com/ https://nonpareil.brouhaha.com/ But the code is still available: https://github.com/brouhaha/nonpareil https://github.com/brouhaha/nonpareil
- anonymousiam 1y agoI use the "realcalc" Android app. I first purchased it for PalmOS sometime around 1999. It's an absolutely fantastic emulator. I use Free42 on my iPad. For the desktop, bc works fine for me.
- anonymousiam 1y agoI took a look at nonpareil, and decided to give it a try. There were a few dependencies that weren't listed, and I had to change wasm.h to wasm_y.h in three files, then it wouldn't build on an nfs mounted filesystem because it was trying to run an executable (str2png). Eventually I got it installed and working. Very cool!