Usability of the HP-94

[Matt Agajanian]

Hi all.

What was the purpose of the HP-94? What were the differences between the D, E and F models besides memory capsacity? Were there practical applications and uses for these models?

Edited: 20 July 2012, 2:23 p.m.

[Eric Smith]

It was intended for industrial use. An example would be warehouse inventory. It was not intended that end users buy the HP-94, but rather that OEMs buy it and configure it with vertical market software.

IIRC, the only difference between the letter suffixes was the amount of memory.

[Bill (Smithville, NJ)]

Matt,

Check out the HP-94 articles at Craig Finseth site (left hand side, towards bottom of page):

hpdata

Bill

Edited: 20 July 2012, 3:18 p.m.

[Katie Wasserman]

There's a version of BASIC and an assembler for it but you need to develop on a DOS machine and move the object code (or tokenized BASIC) to the HP-94. I've used BASIC to make an exceptionally poor quality HP-35 simulator, just to have a reason to have the 94 (D, E and F) in my collection of calculators.

There's no real emulator that runs on DOS that I'm aware of so while you can run the BASIC interpreter to test your code anything that needs to deal with the hardware on the 94 needs to be debugged by transferring the code to an actual 94. It's a giant pain.

[db (martinez, ca.)]

i don't think that your simulator is "poor quality", but i believe it was a giant pain to get it to work.

[Les Koller]

Is the simulator on the web?

[Katie Wasserman]

It's here.

[Les Koller]

Thanks Katie, got it!