rprosperi wrote:Thanks for the comments Garth, they're enlightening. I never heard of a 41C/CV/CX not including the label packet or the black wallet; I had bought a 41C, 41CV and 41CX before 1986, and all had included these items. Perhaps when they made the change to HalfNut, they dropped these items from accessories supplied in the box? About the overlays, all of mine came with 2 beige overlays - 1 blank, 1 with all default shifted functions; again, I assumed HP continued supplying both.
This is my only beige overlay:
The rest of this is getting pretty off-topic; but this forum has very little traffic and I think it would be of interest anyway to the few readers.
though the 71B came in that same period and was a wonderful machine of top quality.
Absolutely. I have two of them, although the second one is bare (ie, no modules) which I got for $25 as surplus before eBay existed. That second one came with nothing but the case, but it was so new the built-in lexan keyboard overlay had a strong smell of being brand new, and there were absolutely no blemishes anywhere on the unit or its case. I still reach for the 41 though unless I have a job for it that the 41 doesn't have enough memory or speed for. I did one thing that the 71 worked for weeks on, generating megabytes of huge files. I just used what I knew, and I wasn't in any hurry; but the 41 would have taken years!
As for the CL, it's battery appetite is directly related to the speed you run it at, 1, 2, 5, 10, 20 or 50 times normal speed. If you keep it at 1x, battery life is basically the same as a normal 41CX, but you can change it to high speed if/when needed.
That's news to me. If you have it do the same things, just faster, and it takes 50x the current for 1/50th of the time, that would equate to the same battery drain; but 50x20mA is a whole amp, and I don't know how the N cells and the contacts would perform. My guess from experimentation with AA's for work is that it might only be possible when the batteries are brand new.
And though it literally holds over 500 modules
Wow, the number keeps increasing. The last I heard was something like 350.
I don't think too many users wore out machines from excessive swapping, as buying that many modules was not cheap, and most users tended to be focused on whatever industry or career field they were in, so only owned a few select modules as appropriate.
What I meant was that if you had for example four 82106A memory modules and only two ROM modules and the card reader, it can't hold them all seven once, so you'd be swapping them out depending on what you need to do.
At the very beginning, when the 41C had such limited RAM, it was more of an issue, but professionals fairly quickly tended to use Mag Cards to load programs when needed.
I never got the card reader until a few years ago when I got a good price on one on eBay which I wanted so I could put something else in the shell like the MLDL (which never happened, and I later got the Clonix-D). I got the tape drive which was better in every way except size, and still works flawlessly, not having any rubber parts to rot. Later I got a second tape drive really cheap as surplus, again before eBay came along.
Over time, I've settled into a 'normal' configuration of: LIB4, OSX, HEPAX and WARP_CORE, and then add PPC, CCD or ZENROM as needed depending on the task at hand.
This is my CATalog 2, shown on the HP92198A 80-column interface and a Zenith monitor:
The forthcoming DM41X will make doing any/all of this stuff MUCH easier and quicker, however as good as the SwissMicros hardware is, the 41's keyboard is still better feeling and laid out as my fingers can recall without thinking.
My problem with the DM41X is that it does not have HPIL or a suitable replacement. HPIL is the whole reason I got into the 41. I've used it to interface to a lot of IEEE-488 workbench test equipment through the HP82169A HPIL-to-HPIB interface converter, and have also used the FSI164A HPIL-to-RS232 interface converter a lot, which is like the HP82164A but has two RS-232 channels standard and up to eight if you paid extra, and had a battery option. I have the HP82165A HPIL-to-parallel interface converter as well. I don't use the HPIL much anymore, but it's still important to me for the occasional times I want it. Without it, the calc would be a "justacalculator."