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Re:The early history of HP calculators by tzs on Sunday September 10, 2017 @07:27AM (#15211750)
I never personally saw this, but I've been told by people that the HP-41 could be massively overclocked at the cost of heavy loss of battery life. Supposedly they could be overclocked sufficiently to handily beat common minicomputers, such as the PDP-11, at floating point.

Allegedly some people hacked interfaces between their PDP-11 and their overclocked HP-41 that allowed the PDP-11 to use the calculator as a floating point coprocessor.

Re:The early history of HP calculators by hota_mazi on Sunday September 10, 2017 @12:47PM (#15212986)
Correct.

The HP 41 had something called "synthetic programming", a flaw that someone once found in the calculator that allowed access to a lot of its internals, including brand new opcodes and capabilities (even graphics, which the HP 41 didn't officially support).

The downside was that doing the wrong thing could cause the calculator to shut down sometimes for days in a row. I once did that to my father's calculator and these were the longest days in my life, dreading that I might have broken his $300+ purchase for silly programming antics.