Old Software found - OT - Printable Version +- HP Forums (https://archived.hpcalc.org/museumforum) +-- Forum: HP Museum Forums (https://archived.hpcalc.org/museumforum/forum-1.html) +--- Forum: Old HP Forum Archives (https://archived.hpcalc.org/museumforum/forum-2.html) +--- Thread: Old Software found - OT (/thread-71335.html) |
Old Software found - OT - Bob - 04-04-2005 In cleaning the basement, I found a box of old software, primarily for the IBM/PC family of computers. It is probably 12-15 years old. These include DOS 5, Win 3.0, Lotus 123, Word, Excel, PCTools, and a graphics package. I also found some PC games like SimCity, SimEarth, Jeopardy, and a couple of fantasy/role-playing games. Several of the productivity packages are still shrinkwrapped. I really don't know whether there is a place to advertise these or if there is an audience out there that might want these, or not. I thought I would start here, since we are all collecting dated material as well.
Is there a classic computer forum or audience similar to this one that might be interested in this "find" ?
Re: Old Software found - OT - Jim Creybohm - 04-04-2005 Good find Bob! There are some sites on the 'net for abandoned software but they exist mostly for games. (for example, abandonia.com and they have links to others). They have zipped versions of the original games, with authors blessing if the company that originally published it is defunct. Whether or not there is any money in them is another thing. There are some Commodore/Amiga and Atari personal computer sites, but I don't know of any classic windows/DOS sites.
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Re: Old Software found - OT - Bob - 04-04-2005 Thanks. Yeah, it was sort of cool, opening the sealed box and seeing all of those packages packed neatly together.
I lost track of these years ago and didn't even know I still had them.
Re: Old Software found - OT - Dave Shaffer (Arizona) - 04-04-2005 Sounds like you were rummaging around in MY basement! (I still use DOS 5.0 for the DOS side of my multi-boot PC.)
Put 'em on E-bay and see who bites. Even if you get 50 cents, as long as they pay the postage, you are ahead. I find that the distaff half of the household is amazingly happy when old stuff like this disappears!
Re: Old Software found - OT - Ed Look - 04-04-2005 Hee hee hee... ... not to sound offensive or evil or anything, but I recently revived an old 80486 to run a spectrometer. Along with it I found similar old software, WordStar, DOS 5, Quattro Pro, Ami Pro... no games, however :( .
But hey, we gleefully cackle over all sorts of antique HP calculators, so every now and then, why not post about your old PCs?
Re: Old Software found - OT - Dave Shaffer (Arizona) - 04-04-2005 Ed, What kind of spectrometer are you running with the PC? (Feel free to reply directly via e-mail if you think we are boring the rest of the inhabitants!) By the way, QuattroPro (for DOS) is my favorite spreadsheet, but I think WordStar fully deserves whatever death it has been administered! And, WordPerfect (DOS or Windoze) is so far superior to Word that it hardly has to be discussed.
Now those claims should raise some hackles! It's like claiming that an 11C is better than a 65, or a 42S is better than a 32S(II), or .....
Re: Old Software found - OT - Eric Lundgren - 04-04-2005 Dave, you prophesized..
(btw, I love both) Re: Old Software found - OT - Ed Look - 04-04-2005 Dave, Dems fightin' woids! But (Lotus') Ami Pro for Windows was better than both WP or WordStar... or even Word... especially WS for Windows, which really stunk. As to the 80486, in the lab, we have an old SPEX fluorescence spectrometer controlled by a 486 proprietarily modified to control the grating positioning and shutters. The slits are manual, of course. Now, the data that comes out of the spectrometer is fed to a second 486 that runs proprietary SPEX data collection software in DOS. This latter one actually was a 486 DX4, running, for those days, at an incredibly blazing rate of 100 MHz. Unfortunately, much less than a year ago the DX4 bought the far... uh, foundry and everyone was affected. Then I remembered I had in by basement an old Gateway 486, with a clock speed of 66 MHz. It still ran and sported a combo 5.25" and 3.5" floppy drive (in one unit!!) and two hard drives, again, for those days, a fairly generous 420 Mb each. I dusted it off and carted into the lab and there is still is processing our data. Now, the coolest part is that in doing so, I found my old DOS based software, my old Win 3.11 software. I do have a soft spot for WordStar DOS; I think sometimes I still silently mouth the key sequences for bold, italic, superscript, cut, paste, etc. I think I also ran Star Trek: Judgment Rites and EGATrek on it! I miss using Quattro Pro. I think it was (emphasis on past tense) superior to Excel. Unfortunately, some guy on the West Coast made it so that competitors' products either couldn't run or ran poorly in Windows... ... what to do with a (still functioning) Toshiba P321 dot matrix printer?! Finally, apologies for this totally OT and potentially HP calc fan boring post.
Thanks for the memory stimulation, Dave, though!
Re: Old Software found - OT - GWB - 04-04-2005 Quote:
Had the 32sii at least 2KB RAM, matrix operations and a decent complex mode, local numeric labels and shared numeric registers in addition to the 26 alpha variables it would be close to perfection. One could say the 32sii is better than the 42s only if these features aren't required. Edited: 4 Apr 2005, 11:44 p.m.
What makes a Word Processor Good - really OT - John L. Shelton - 04-05-2005 Dave posts an interesting challenge. Why is Word Perfect, Word Star, or Word (or Apple's new Pages) better than any other? Here are some attributes of a winning word processor:
Are there other attributes of a "good" word processor? 32SII -- well-said! - Karl Schneider - 04-05-2005 GWB posted, Quote:
My thoughts exactly. I think a 32SII with the following:
would be the ideal target for the OpenRPN initiative. For much more functionality than that, the PDA might be the industry-preferred platform.
-- KS
Re: What makes a Word Processor Good - really OT - Bob - 04-06-2005 Quote - "Are there other attributes of a "good" word processor? How does yours fare against this checklist? "
I have always been a big fan of "inexpensive" or "affordable" as attributes in my WP. :-)
Re: 32SII -- well-said! - GWB - 04-06-2005 Karl Schneider suggested:
Quote: HP has implemented only the second suggestion on the praised 33S, actually the easiest one to do. Why have other obvious improvements not been made? Lack of skill or just marketing reasons? Regards,
Gerson.
reason-NCEES - Ron Ross - 04-06-2005 I suspect that Hp found out the limitations and direction of this agency and then beefed up their Hp32sii to that ceiling without going over. Any long variable names were out (to close to text editing I suspect for the NCEES). That matrix features were left out is because it may open all sorts of problems and bugs that Hp did not want to address if they tried to shoehorn these features into an Hp32sii. I/O was definitly out if you want NCEES approval.
Since this is a very important exam, Hp wanted a compliant calculator (and now that the NCEES now specifically allows only listed 6 calculators) and we have the Hp33s as a result/compromise.
Re: 32SII -- well-said! - Thomas Okken - 04-07-2005 My thoughts exactly. I think a 32SII with [...] real good complex number support (better than the 15C, 42S, or 48G) would be the ideal target for the OpenRPN initiative. How would you wish to improve the 42S's complex number support? For Free42, I have received some interesting suggestions, like allowing polar entry while in rectangular mode, or adding a 'mixed' mode where a complex number's representation becomes a property of the number, rather than a global setting. Those features may make it into Free42 eventually (if I can still stand the sight of the $#*^%(* thing once I'm done with BCD support...). I'm interested in hearing what other suggestions for improvement people might have -- not promising to implement any of them; partly I'm just curious, because I, personally, have always felt 100% happy with the way the HP-42S does complex numbers. If the OpenRPN hardware will support flash programming, it will probably be an easy matter to port Free42 to run on it. The perfect non-RPL calculator may yet come to be one day!
- Thomas
Re: Old Software found - OT - Thomas Okken - 04-07-2005 what to do with a (still functioning) Toshiba P321 dot matrix printer?!
I once wondered the same thing about an ancient but indestructible Apple Imagewriter printer. I hacked up something that converted PBM bitmaps to ImageWriter graphics escapes, and by using ghostscript's pbm driver, I managed to configure it all so that you could 'lpr' PostScript files to it, from a Sun SPARCstation IPC, like any old (or new!) laser printer. Re: 32SII -- well-said! - V-PN - 04-07-2005 Add quarternions, please! Complex Number Support (was: Re: 32SII -- well-said!) - Jeff O. - 04-07-2005 Thomas, Re: Complex Number Support (was: Re: 32SII -- well-said!) - V-PN - 04-07-2005 R->P and P->R Re: Complex Number Support (was: Re: 32SII -- well-said!) - Karl Schneider - 04-08-2005 Jeff's posted ended with --
Quote: Thanks! I was wondering how you expressed my thoughts almost exactly. :-) I was going to dig up that post as a response to Thomas, but you saved me the trouble. I would differ on only several points:
Quote: No -- I think there should be a user-specified display mode for complex-valued results. For certain applications, either a polar representation or a rectanglular representation might not be meaningful. My "inspriration" for this was complex-valued calculation for AC power systems. AC voltage and current phasors are usually given in polar form; impedance, admittance, and complex power are usually given in rectangular form. For example, complex power injected into a short line with impedance Z = R + jX between voltages V1@ang1 and V2@ang2:
S = P + jQ = V1@ang1 * conj(I) The user would enter V1 and V2 in polar form, Z in rectangular form, and view the result S in rectangular form. Or,
I = (V1@ang1 - V2@ang2) / Z The user would enter V1 and V2 in polar form, Z in rectangular form, and view the result I (phasor current) in polar form.
-- KS
Edited: 8 Apr 2005, 2:11 a.m. after one or more responses were posted
Re: Complex Number Support (was: Re: 32SII -- well-said!) - htom - 04-08-2005 Complex display mode: Rectangle; Polar; follow X; Last entered (default); I'd back up and have everything carry its "mode" about, especially since I want to have some of the 16c functions. One's compliment, Two's complement, Sign-Magnitude, Unsigned for bitstrings. Big-endian and small-endian tracking.
(the list gets very large, I'll stop.)
Re: Old Software found - OT - Marcus von Cube - 04-08-2005 Quote: Try the "Vintage Computing" forum on CompuServe: http://community.compuserve.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?webtag=ws-vintagecomp
You can browse as a guest. To post you need to join but that's free.
Re: Complex Number Support (was: Re: 32SII -- well-said!) - Jeff O. - 04-08-2005 Karl, Re: Complex Number Support (was: Re: 32SII -- well-said!) - Karl Schneider - 04-10-2005 Jeff -- I'd say that your complex-number display format options make things a bit complicated. As a general principle, I'd prefer that the calculator not change the format of a displayed number unless I request it. Hence, I would not favor options 2 or 3 of display. (That's what bugs me about the 48: The user can enter a complex value in either mode, but it will be displayed in the set mode after entry, as will all other complex numbers in the stack.) Regarding, "3. match X value", I also would have qualms about forcing the format of a complex-valued result to match that of the "Last x" value. Obviously, it would not apply if a real number were in the x-reg. What's special about the x-input? In my example where I is calculated by V/Z, I would be displayed in rectangular format if Z were, which is probably not what the user wanted. In essence, I'd want only option 1 for display of entries, and option 2 or 3 for display of results. Additionally, I would prefer that the user be allowed to attach a unit of measurement for every angle -- degree, radian, or gradient. If a scalar and an angle are assembled to produce a complex number (using "R->C"), then that number is in polar form. If two scalars are assembled, "R->C" produces a rectangular-form number. This would come in handy for trigonometric calculations: cos-1 0.6 would display 53.13o in DEG mode.
Re: Complex Number Support (was: Re: 32SII -- well-said!) - Jeff O. - 04-11-2005 Quote:You are not the first person to accuse me of making things overly complicated. I prefer to think of it as covering all of the bases. Quote:I agree completely. I would include those modes only in case someone else might actually prefer them. Quote:There's nothing special about the x-input. If we allow mixed format display, there obviously would have to be some rule to handle the situation. I was just suggesting another method. Actually I guess you could also have a "match y-value", but that really would be overly complicated. Also, if the x-value is a real number, the result would automatically default to the y-value's format. Your suggestion for tagging angle values with a degree, rad or grad unit sounds good to me. Re: 32SII -- well-said! - Hugh Evans - 04-11-2005 Flash is a major design requirement for OpenRPN. I'm personally looking forward to seeing what software and emulators end up being developed/ported for our hardware. My guess is that many more re-implimentations similar to free42 will appear.
Re: Complex Number Support (was: Re: 32SII -- well-said!) - htom - 04-11-2005 I goofed that up big time. I thought that there were two other cases (than rect and polar), but there are three. R) Rectangular (result always in R) P) Polar (result always in P) L) Last complex entry (result in whichever, R, or P, was used as a complex entry; use that format, changing when an entry -- not a result -- is made in the other) (default) O) Other than complex entry (result in whichever, R or P, that the entry wasn't. "Last", only with a flip of the result, for when you're doing a series of things that start with R entries and you want the result in P, or vice versa.)
D) Displayed as x is (result comes back R or P, whichever most recent x, result or entry, was)
Quaternions - Thomas Okken - 04-12-2005 Add quarternions, please!
Interesting! I never knew anyone still used quaternions -- from what I remember from college, they were only mentioned as a historical curiosity (and as an example of non-commutative multiplication, I think). Re: Complex Number Support (was: Re: 32SII -- well-said!) - Thomas Okken - 04-12-2005 Personally, I like Jeff's original proposal better, because it adds a lot of convenience while adding minimal complexity to the user interface. It's possible to cover more scenarios, but the additional modes or keystrokes could easily become confusing and hard to remember.
I think there's always a danger, when trying to design improvements to classics like the 32SII or 42S, of turning them into something too complex to use (like the 48G -- I bought one recently so I could run INPRT, and then I tried playing with it, just for fun, and as usual, I end up tearing my hair out).
Re: Quaternions - Hugh Evans - 04-12-2005 I've mostly heard of quaternions being applied in physics and aerospace engineering.
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