Books for HP 71

[PeterP]

Hi,

I recently decided to follow the advise from one of the esteemed and regular posters here and accquired an HP 71 and now I'd like to learn how to program it. (the only other HP I own and know a little bit how to use is the 41)

From searching the forum archives it seems that there are two books that would be tremendously helpful in this regard:

1) HP-71 BASIC Made Easy by Joseph K. Horn
2) The Basic HP-71 by Richard Harvey

I have posted in the 'ad' section my interested to buy those books, yet with no success so far. So now I am wondering if there might be someone in our community who would be willing to lend me one/both of those books for say 2 weeks(tight) or 4 weeks (generous). I'd naturally pay all shipping charges and also be open to discussing some kind of security the owner would like in case he/she feels the need.

It would be most appreciated if one of you can be so kind and help me out, I hear those two books are most informative and enjoable to read.

Thanks so much for you kind consideration

Cheers

Peter

[Garth Wilson]

So your 71 didn't come with the manuals? The HP manuals are by far the best I've ever seen. You just start at the beginning, and knowledge is layered on knowledge, until you get to the end and feel like you know the machine, without ever having gotten to "the hard part." You can get them (plus the various volumes of the internal design specifications, manuals for the various modules, and a lot more) on the CDs from this website.

Garth

wilsonmineszdslextremezcom (replace the z's with @ and .)

[Howard Owen]

The HP manuals from that era are excellent; all hail the ancient HP.

What's missing for the 71 in the public corpus (i.e, on the Museum DVD) are nice "friendly" docs beyond the manuals. The 71 came out in an era when consumers were getting their first ever opportunities to buy computers. BASIC was supposed to be a beginner's language. In the US, the Apple II, Commodore 64, Tandy CoCo and others all had "Introduction to BASIC" books available. It looks like the referenced titles may have been just such books for the 71.

I don't think it's unreasonable for someone to ask for access to that on this board. We've all painstakingly garnered our knowledge over the years from lots of sources. I know I can attribute most of my knowledge to hugely generous people who encouraged and guided my efforts over the years. I've tried to pass some of that on out of gratitude to those folks.

I've also known users who wouldn't take any action on their own behalf, preferring instead to ask question after question, each revealing that the last answer hadn't been acted on in the interim. I tend to turn people like that away with advice to read the friendly manual. But I never assume a newbie is in that category until he or she has been around a while. There truly are no stupid questions, unless you count those that get repeated by users of the second kind above. But the first couple of times you hear them, you can't tell the two types apart.

Food for thought,

Howard

[Garth Wilson]

Howard,

I think you took my "So your 71 didn't come with the manuals?" comment to be sarcastic. I apologize, as I didn't mean it that way. I hate it when manuals get lost or tossed instead of kept with the equipment, and then someone like the OP does not get the benefit of those good manuals that should have been sent right along with the computer. Unfortunately it's all too common. He may also have gotten just the reference manual and not the owner's manual, and not realized there even was an owner's manual. That's not his fault of course. Either way, I wanted him to know the manuals are available on the CDs, so he's not stuck.

Garth

[Howard Owen]

Sorry for the misunderstanding, Garth. I guess I was primed by a recent exchange with another member to see "newbie abuse" in everything. 8)

Regards,
Howard

[Howard Owen]

The books you refer to are quite rare. I have seen the Horn book on eBay a couple of times in the last two years.

But Joe Horn is still with us. He attends the HHC meetings regularly. His hobby page has a section for the 71B, but alas, no reference to the book you seek. You may be able to contact him via that website, however.

Regards,
Howard

(Changed "HPCC" to "HHC" above. Just got my newsletter, and the acronyms got scrambled. 8)

Edited: 24 Feb 2007, 11:59 p.m.

[PeterP]

Thanks a lot guys, I will get the manual and owners book from Dave's wonderful DVD and I also sent an email to Joe Horn - thanks for the link to his webpage.

When I re-bought an 41CX a couple years ago, I also went out and tried to locate and buy all the books that have been written about this wonderful machine. From Wlodek's Red Bible to the Wickes and Jarett books and down to Dodin's book on Machine coding. I also got from Dave's, TOS's and Jake's DVD and painfully printed out and sorted all PPC, HHPC, CHUU etc articles and sorted them into math, tools, games, synthetic and machine coding. I just love reading and learning about those machines as much as possible - even got myself Meinderts MLDL and a HEPAX (that was my luckiest buy ever, what a fantastic module that one is) and learned a bit of machine coding. Not that my brain will ever allow me to play in the ranks of the grandmasters here on the forum but I simply enjoy the process of learning and getting better a little bit every day.

So my interest in the those books is genuine and they will (hopefully the right tense) be read and carefully followed through page by step (I did all exercises from Wlodek in the Red Bible, although I failed on a couple).

Anyway, I will start with printing out the manuals and follow them, and maybe by the time I am through with them, somehow there might be a way for me to learn from those two books as well. I have also recovered from the HHPC Datafile most articles about the 71, either from Jake's DVD or from Valentin's webpage (thanks for that Valentin). After the manual I should be in much better shape to understand them ;-)

Thanks again and please let me know of any other advice you can offer to me in learning this new machine.

Cheers

Peter