Cool story :) out of curiosity, do you program those kind of things on the calculator itself? I did that with the hp49g and was proud of the programs I was able to write in such a constrained environment, but the single line display of the 41c would be a real achievement!
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Thanks for asking. Yes, the calculator itself was the first "computer" that I owned, and there was nothing else to connect it to, or to emulate it with. (I had my own PDP-11 at work, and I had previously done batch-mode programming on an IBM 370.) I bought my 41C in 1979 (made in the US!), and spent several thousand dollars on peripherals over a period of about three years. It was a big investment in a platform that did not interoperate with anything else, and I ended up giving it all away. I didn't keep any of it, including all the programs I had written and stored on magnetic cards (a fine example of extinct storage media).
I may still have a spiral notebook, in which I did all of the code development. It would be a hard-copy of all the code I wrote. If I do still have it, I have no idea where it is. It sort of reminds me of the end of Citizen Kane.
Later on, I also got rid of my Synertek SYM-1 and all my CP/M platforms, except for one IMSAI 8080 S-100 box, which I eventually gave away to someone else. I didn't realize at the time (nearly 30 years ago) that the IMSAI 8080 was quite collectable, and was going for about $800 on eBay. Still, I didn't regret it much.
The old systems evoke a sympathetic nostalgia, but actually using them is an exercise in patience, and eventually evokes a desire for more modern systems.
I've still got some emulated retro hardware and some old software emulators, but I don't really use them much.
To this day, I still use a linux desktop simulator for the HP-41CX calculator!
The original website seems now offline:
https://nonpareil.brouhaha.com/
But the code is still available:
I took a look at nonpareil, and decided to give it a try. There were a few dependencies that weren't listed, and I had to change wasm.h to wasm_y.h in three files, then it wouldn't build on an nfs mounted filesystem because it was trying to run an executable (str2png). Eventually I got it installed and working. Very cool!
I use the "realcalc" Android app. I first purchased it for PalmOS sometime around 1999. It's an absolutely fantastic emulator. I use Free42 on my iPad.
For the desktop, bc works fine for me.