[whartung]

Kermit was a hidden gem on the HP-48.

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.