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by ractive
1147 days ago
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I never thought, I'd read again about ZMODEM and Kermit. To learn programming and dive more into C/C++, I implemented both protocols while writing a Windows application to transfer files from the PC to a HP48 graphics calculator over the serial port in ca. 1999. This app then became the "official" PC link program "HPComm", released under the GPL. Almost 25 years go... :-o https://hpcomm.sourceforge.net/index-old.html |
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Company I was doing work for was looking at handheld solutions for on site data collection. One of the things they were looking at was something from Symbol. Nice unit, but, $2k a pop.
I was out visiting my father who happened to have an HP-48, which I had not seen before.
Fiddling with it I managed to learn quite a bit about its (now legendary) capabilities. But I was quite surprised to learn it had a serial port and support for Kermit.
Returning home, I bought one and quickly prototyped a solution for the company, where they’d upload the data from the calculators each day straight to the HP-9000 via Kermit.
You could buy the HP-48 base model for $100, and they ran forever on AAA batteries. We ended up rolling out the project and they bought a dozen of them.
That was a really fun project. I coded much of the calculator code lying in bed.