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About The Simulator

My RPN Calculator is a Windows program that was written in C++ using Microsoft's WIN32 API. The program (14,500 C++ statements), these help pages (33,000 words), and the example calculator programs were written over a period of a few months in 2001 by yours truly, John Kopplin, in Boise, Idaho. This program is compatible with Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT 4, Windows 2000, and Windows XP. It should run acceptably on any PC no matter its age as long as it contains one of these operating systems.

I wrote this Windows program to teach programming to beginners. It is the first component in my curriculum which proceeds next to assembly language via another one of my programs that simulates an 8051 microprocessor. It is easy for beginners to feel overwhelmed by modern programming languages and computer jargon and the RPN calculator allows them to start writing programs without ever having heard of bits, bytes, assemblers, compilers, syntax errors, etc. After learning assembly language, my curriculum concludes by teaching the high-level C++ language.

My RPN Calculator most closely resembles the model HP-29C calculator that was sold by Hewlett-Packard in the late 1970's. The HP-29C calculator could not draw graphs, print programs, save programs on a disk drive, display all four levels of the stack, etc., etc. so a PC based simulation of a hand calculator actually has some significant advantages over the original.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank David G. Hicks who runs "The Museum of HP Calculators" which you can find on the Internet at the URL:

http://www.hpmuseum.org

David's site has lots of info and pictures on the history of HP's calculators. I used one of his photos as the basic backdrop for my RPN calculator.


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