HEWLETT-PACKARD HP 9825
The HP 9825 was introduced in 1976 as a replacement for the 9820 calculator. It had a full QWERTY keyboard and used a 32-digit LED alphanumeric display.

They were very popular as instrument controllers.

HPL
The 9825 introduced a programming language called HPL. It supported strings, arrays, looping and even interrupts.

Here is an example program to generate a list of prime numbers:

0: fxd 0
1: prt 1
2: prt 2
3: 1->P
4: for C=2 to 1000000
5: P+2->P
6: for N=3 to P/3
7: if int(P/N)*N = P; gto 4
8: next N
9: prt P
10: next C

Conversion

Question:
I recently got an HP 9825A calculator from about 1982. I still have tape cartridges with some HPL programms that I would like to transfer to a PC. So, now I am searching an emulator to run HPL on a standard PC. Does there exist anything like that ?

Thomas.Schmidt
Germany

Answer 1:
Back in the late 80's or early 90's, a company called Oswego Software marketed a series of translation utilities to convert from various proprietary and/or obsolete languages to more readily available platforms. They had, among other things, an HPL to HP Series 200/300 BASIC converter, described in their literature as a "four pass translator." They claimed it would translate about 90% of an HPL program. I figure they were implying that the remaining 10% had to be hand coded. It also included a utility to send HPL code from a 9825 to a Series 200/300 machine over the HP-IB interface. I would imagine that one could also use HT BASIC or HP BASIC for Windows on a PC to run the resulting Series 200/300 program (more or less) directly.

Alas, I do not have this utility, so I cannot tell you any more about it.

Regards,
Stan

Answer 2:
A company in Salt Lake was once going to create a version of HPL that ran on a personal computer (before IBM introduced the PC). They advertised the product. As one of the later developers of the HPL language, I flew from Colorado to Salt Lake to investigate. Turns out the ad was a tickler to see if there was a demand for such a product. They never even started work on the project. To my knowledge, that was the only third party to ever even consider moving HPL to a different computer.

Steve Leibson

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This advertisement appeared in the March 1976 issue of Scientific American.


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Updated October 9, 2004