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?

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. No one is surprised; calculators have limited space, and printing random patterns isn’t a primary function for standard use cases.

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.

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.