15 Apr
2007
15 Apr
'07
8:36 p.m.
The nostalgia value would come at least in large part
from the printer,
the display, the keyboard feel...things no emulator can do.
I know the feeling (!). To me, much of the interest in these old machines
is being able to 'get inside the processor' with test equipment -- the
98x0 processor is 80 chips, all of them pretty simple (well, perhaps 100
chips if you count things like the M and T registers which are physcially
on the memory interface boards). No emlulator can let me do that...
The keyobard on the HP0910 uses the same ingenious balanced transformer
system (the 9830, alas, is conventional switches), and the same printer
was used in the 9810 and 9820. The displays are very different (the 9810
having 3 lines of 7 segment numberic displays to show the 3 RPN stack
levels). The point being, of course, that the 9810 is a lot easier to
find than the 9820 (although still hard)...
I also suspect that the machine I used had a bunch of the optional
software ROMs, like the one that provides trig, which I would expect to
also be difficult to find.
The ROMs _are_ considerably harder to find than the machines (and
interfaces/peripherals are not common either). The maths ROM is probably
the easiest to find, though, most people who bought one of these
calculators wanted the trig functions, etc. Note that the ROMs for the
9810 and 9820 are different.
-tony