The day is near to celebrate the 40th birthday of the HP9810A.
The first machines where produced in late 1971. One of my 9810s (I have 3 working and one waiting fo repair) may be one of the oldest produced in Boeblingen, Germany. It has the serial 1147G00560 which qualifies it as one of the first series. The ICs inside have datecodes between 7045 and 7144. The seal on the memory cage has a hand written date 7.2.72 (7th of feb. 1972), obviously written by a HP service man (the famous KG., whoever that may have been) when the machine was delivered to the customer, my school. So the machine must have been assembled somewhen between November 1971 and January 1972. I'm curious if someone has an older 9810. I was able to buy that machine some years ago from my old school.
On that very machine I wrote my first program ever in 1973, which solves a highly complex mathematical problem: calculating the binomial products of two numbers entered by the user. The program was coded with a pencil on marked cards and could be entered into the calc by the 9860A card reader.
My contribution to the birthday is the latest release 1.50 of my HP9800 emulator, which may be found on www.sourceforge.net/projects/hp9800e. It will propably be the final release since after nearly five years I finished the family of series 9800 calculators with the HP9821A. After a long quest I came by the original 9821 system ROMs and read them out for use in the emulator.
