HP software archive

[HP-Paul]

HP used to publish a catalog of user submitted programs for various calculator models. There were thousands of programs in every conceivable technical area. Has somebody archived all the programs and is the archive available? Specifically, I am looking for cubic spline curve smoothing software for an HP-41. Please help. Thanks!

[Ellis Easley]

That has been discussed here in the past, look in the archives. Basically, the HP user's library archive has been shuttled from one garage to another mini-warehouse because there has been nowhere to keep it properly and no single, reliable way to put it on the internet.

Have you looked in the Museum's HP-41C Software Library? Some user's library programs made their way into the application pacs.

Also, the CHHU Swap Disk files are on the Museum's FTP site. Maybe someone will remind us how to get them back on a 9114 diskette!

[Tony Duell]

I have disk images of 33 club swapdisks, including those that are already on the ftp site as separate files. What I mean by disk images are
630K files containing the sector-by-sector image of the 9114 disk. I have a linux program to dump that back to a physical disk so I can use them
in my 9114. (In fact, that's how the lif utilities for linux on the HPCC web site started...)
Anyway, if anyone wants these images and can suggest a sutable place to upload them to (my internet connection is slow, so I am not going to mail them out to individual people), then e-mail me and I'll see
what can be done.

[Ellis Easley]

The Museum seems like the perfect place! I think I could finally manage to muddle through learning how to use Linux if I had a goal like this to work for.

Alternatively, I might be able to write a DOS program to put the sectors on a disk, either through the PC HPIL interface on to a 9114, or directly to the PC floppy drive. One limitation is that the PC BIOS only knows how to handle 512 byte sectors (at least in the old days) but I have written program fragments to control the FDC directly and I think I could expand on that to do the job, at least under DOS.

[Tony Duell]

The linus programs I've written are open-source (GPLed), in fact they're _only_ distributed as C source.
So there should be no problem in figuring out the file format. Feel free to write similar programs for other OSes (but don't expect me to do that :-))
Linux makes it easier to directly talk to the FDC chip, though -- I've written 'alien' disk read/write programs for MS-DOS and it was a lot more work than for linux.
As regards the swapdisk images, I have no problem with uploading them to this museum -- remind me in a week or so and I'll start uploading the gzipped images