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David Reim's avatar

Memory is a weird thing. I could have recalled one million things from my life and not remembered the moon rocket landing game on the HP-65. However, within the first paragraph of your article, I was right back to twelve years old and being obsessed with this game on Mr. Pomerantz’s (my junior high math teacher) funky, chunky new calculator. I remember the strip. I remember plugging in numbers to see what would happen. I remember having fun. I remember thinking that the calculator was so really cool.

That memory made me think of the HP plotter that teacher had. We used to draw “race tracks” on the plotter paper and then three or four people could have a “race” by each controlling the input of a different colored pen. A couple of years later I arrived at high school where they had a general purpose computer with a tape reader and a bank of toggle switches that had to be flipped in a certain order to load the OS. Eventually I got a degree in computer science and ended up at Apple working on their OS. Starting out with something like the HP-65 is how many of us ended up sliding into the computer industry.

Thanks for reminding me of a little drop of my life.

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Joseph Holmes's avatar

My father also was a big fan of the HPs, and he had the HP-67 which was a lot like the HP-65. He actually wrote programs for the thing, and he subscribed to a programmable HP calculator users' group newsletter, the name of which escapes me now. We played the moonlander game on that machine. (In fact, through that newsletter we learned how to break into the calculator's hidden registers by flicking a piece of metal across the batter contacts. You could create crazy animations, like the one I remember that imitated a ping pong game.)

(He eventually retired from his job as an engineer and did database programming for the rest of his working life.)

And when he moved up to the HP-41c, he passed the HP-67 along to me. I really got into it. I was never more than a primitive programmer, but I loved the simple programming of the HP-67 and I spent weeks learning it.

Eventually I wrote a simple game that imitated a drag race -- by pressing certain keys, you could accelerate and brake, and the readout would display your speed and the distance to the finish line. The tricky part was stopping before you hit the wall a certain distance past the finish line. I titled it '67 Mustang Drag Race and submitted it to the newsletter where it was later published. My one and only game development.

Eventually the card reader stopped working, the batteries no longer charged (though it ran on its wall charger), and I sold it on eBay. But to this day I much prefer RPN calculators, and our household calculator in a drawer upstairs is an HP.

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