Over the years, I’ve been on a silly quest to do 10PRINT on as many things as I can. They end up on X, here, or sometimes both.

I hadn’t considered it before because I just figured I couldn’t print the "/" and "\" characters on the HP-42s.

I was wrong. It’s pretty easy. After a few minutes in the manual, I figured it out.

00 { 45-Byte Prgm }
01▸LBL "TEN"
02 RAN
03 RAN
04 X>Y?
05 GTO "\"
06▸LBL "/"
07 ├"/"
08 AVIEW
09 PSE
10 GTO "TEN"
11▸LBL "\"
12 ├"\"
13 AVIEW
14 PSE
15 GTO "TEN"
16 END

The program is pretty simple. It generates two random numbers and compares them. If the first is greater than the second, it prints a "/" and goes to the next iteration. If the second is greater than the first, it prints a "\" and goes to the next iteration.

The “famous” 10PRINT program on vintage computers was a delight for many in the 70s and 80s. It’s fun to port to other platforms and machines.

I’m always looking for calculators that can do it. It requires both a slash - ASCII character 47, and a backslash - ASCII character 92. Most calculators can print the forward slash, but the backslash is only sometimes implemented.

I was recently on a video call with a friend, throwing around some ideas for a new product. I mentioned adding large signed numbers in assembly and using two’s complement. He asked me what two’s complement was. I was a little surprised that he didn’t know. He’s been a Java programmer for more than 30 years. Java and Python programmers (and others like gasp Commodore / MicroSoft BASIC) don’t have a native unsigned integer type. The language takes care of the details for you.

I’ve been on the prowl for an HP-16c for quite some time to add to my rather large calculator collection. My daily driver for the last 25 years is an HP-32SII. Simple, rugged, reliable, and does everything I need it to do.

I stumbled on a kit that runs an emulated HP-16c and took the plunge. It was about 1/4 of the price of even the cheapest original devices on eBay and with an aluminum frame, it looked worth a try. Plus, there’s something cool about assembling things yourself.