I can still remember the fog clearing out of my mind when I started to understand what the code was doing. Being able to plan something up, program it and see it work was an absolute blast, a gateway drug to a career still going strong after several decades.
Imagine my surprise when many, many years later, I learnt that the pocket calculator had a full PDP-11 (LSI-11 compatible, to be specific) with QBus inside...
Never saw a lisp one though. Interesting where one can get one for old Tim sake.
Edit: it was a Sharp CE-122: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1e/PC_1210_...
But I had very serious floating point computing needs, because GPS was not yet invented. I managed to install Turbo Pascal in it and steal someones Nautical Almanac - algorithms.
Honestly, stuff like this provides some much needed escapism for me as I feel burned out from scraping all the cruff from the bottom of the Jira barrel wihch is most "tech" jobs nowadays and miss the days I used to just tinker with stuf I enjoy. Now, after 8 hours of shoveling dev-ops/CI-CD crap or fixing last-minute shit that randomly broke due to updated lib or package, I just want o put the laptop away and be done with "tech" for the day.
— Alan J. Perlis
From the opening of SICP. I didn't think it was the most amazing quote when I read it but when I hear the frustration and cynicism of many devs on the state of computing it makes me wonder.
From my experience at least 90% of people passionate about technology have never heard of LISP. If you restrict that set of people to just programmers then a lot more of them have heard of it, but there's still a surprising amount that haven't.
My 50g is one of the most convenient ways to check my arithmetic when it comes to dates and hours calculations.
I think overall though, these are a relic and the best way forward i’m aware of today are the “mathemtics notepad” type applications that reimagine what a calculator looks like on a desktop.
At the cli i get more mileage out of gnu units than i’d have thought…
The large enter of hp-48 and earlier RPN calculators makes way more sense, especially if you're going to do anything fast. TBQH, I'd love a hp-50g internals (or better) in hp-48gx case :)
By the time the 50 rolled around, computers had reduced the role of calculators in professional work, and HP was left addressing the enthusiast and educational markets. But the educational market was (and is) already heavily locked up by TI. So the 50G wound up being a compromise product (and built to a lower price point). IMO, the diminished Enter key and 'algebraic first' aspects of the design are direct attempts by HP to cater to people who might otherwise be using TI.
As someone who was enthusiastic about HP48's back in the day, I have to admit that I'm a little sad that the market hasn't continued to develop. But to be perfectly honest, modern technology and software is so much more capable, and I have no desire at all to carry another special function device if I can avoid it. My guess is that this is a fairly widespread opinino.
> TBQH, I'd love a hp-50g internals (or better) in hp-48gx case :)
I'd always hoped they'd do both that (With the old school black/blue/yellow color scheme) and a version of the 50g in the 200LX case. Between the faster CPU of the 50G and the much bigger screen of the 200, the result would have been a great rendition of the core RPL software. (For 1994-5, at least).
On a side note James Donnelly's HP 48 Programmers Toolkit added CAR and CDR commands.
https://buyee.jp/item/yahoo/auction/j714515522
Still my all time favorite for the 70 colors ist the Casio PB-100
Edit: thanks for that site: I will be very poor soon.
PockEmul (https://github.com/matsumo/PockEmul) also seems to support emulating the PB-2000C and AI-1000.
It's not clear from the bit of the video I watched, but presumably there was some sort of IDE-like help with this?
And frankly, that machine was luxurious!! Multi-line display, reasonably sized keyboard? NICE. The ones I used were typically one or two line displays. Workable, but not pleasant.
Today, yeah. We have very luxurious user interface capabilities! Fantastic displays, sounds, keyboards, touch screens, and lots of storage, can run multiple programs at once.
Back then, the inspiration was simply being able to write and run a program. The bonus with these little pocket computers was being able to do that on the go, where you are.
I was doing manufacturing back when these things popped up. Getting one was huge! I filled one with a bunch of programs that could compute things needed to make parts quickly and accurately.
There were good computers, but they were in offices generally far away from where the action was. A lot of effort went into making sure the people making things had the info they needed to do that too.
But, that didn't always happen with prototypes and or jigs, fixtures and other things needed to make the intended things.
I basically encoded my skills into that little pocket computer and could think something up, or be handed a drawing and just go make stuff from that input data and do so with few worries.
Prior to these kinds of devices, people would use reference sheets, or go to where they could use a computer to generate the detail data they need, or just break out pencil and paper and do the math with some calculator or other.
The ones I used offered BASIC. And for the time, getting some RAM, a respectable BASIC, a screen, etc... meant being able to write programs to solve problems and get the benefit of those solutions multiple times, on demand.
Today, of course, we carry around phones with computers attached and they are crazy powerful! Today we've got apps for people to use too.
At that time, the IDE was the device, a reference card, manual in the carrying case, and if you were lucky, some storage options and or printed output options. Otherwise, it was use the little screen and keyboard to bang the program out, run it, debug it, then use it.
Truth is a couple of Mhz, reasonable RAM and basic I/O can do a whole lot! That is exactly what these little guys did, in addition to being portable, which I wrote a little about above.
Most of the value is still there too. Often we have an app, but we could also have more people writing little programs on their phones.
Lots of resistance to that, and I understand why, but...
This topic got me to thinking about Hypercard for mobile.
Package up all the hard bits, give people a few robust options and a place to input the few lines of code that matter and suddenly we have all the value of those little devices and in a way more powerful form.
The comment I posted on lobste.rs:
I’ve been curious about this computer for some years, and bid on one some time ago, but at more than 600 € that was more than I was going to pay for it.
As far as I know, the machine is internally the same as the PB-2000C which I do have, just with different key labels and a different ROM. There is an emulator for Windows here: https://pockemul.com/
There is even a Prolog ROM, but again for me it’s not worth the going prices: https://www.casio880.com/categoria_productos/casio/ai-1000/
I wanted to build myself a modern version of this based on the Planet Computers Gemini (https://www.www3.planetcom.co.uk/gemini-pda) which in theory can run Linux, but I’ve had so much trouble with it (running Linux) that I had to postpone it until I can find some time again.
Edit: the video description includes several interesting links including Pocket Emul.
When we put a story in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), the timestamp gets relativized to the re-up time, which can be confusing, though not as confusing as not doing it. More explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
I can easily recommend an Arduino or a clone instead of a Raspberry PI to anyone wanting to get their hands dirty.
I remember being proud of conpressing 16 pixels of my monochrome draw program into a character.
