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Has there been a thread discussing the various ROM revisions for the HP-71B? If not, could someone provide me some information regarding the ROM revision history? I have several 71's with different ROM versions and I'm curious about the revisions what the bugs were. It got my curiosity because the Text Editor manual indicated some issues with certain versions of the system ROM if the editor was called from a BASIC program. It indicated that the earlier versions could cause corrupted files if you didn't follow a certain procedure.
Thanks
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There are three public ROM versions:
1BBBB is the first public version, and the most common,
2CCCC is a rare version with a lot of minor bugs corrected, but it also adds a extra major bug,
2CDCC, which replaced soon the 2CCCC version fixing the major bug.
In this forun, it was also mentionned a prototype version (1AAAA), or even earlier developement versions, but I don't have any information on them.
J-F
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I have a 71B date code 2401A00135 with software 1AAAA.
It is definitely NOT a prototype.
Look back to the forum archives 20th August 2002, I posted info about this and had several interesting replies.
Regards,
Gordon
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Sorry Gordon, I remembered this thread, but didn't check before replying.
How did you come across this machine? Did you get it from HP at this time, maybe as a preproduction machine, or for evaluation purpose?
J-F
Posts: 331
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Hi, I bought the 1AAA machine from another person in England in July this year. It is in poor condition and was sold as not working, but I bought it for the ROMs and card reader which were together with it.
When I cleaned up the 71B and battery contacts it worked!