I remember thinking about upgrading my HP48G when I was in high school. In the end I saved up and bought the HP48GX plus a calculus expansion card instead. That came in handy for the Calculus and Physics classes I had that year.
The funniest thing I ever did back then was to hook up the serial port to a 1200 baud modem with lots of big red blinkenlights. I found a simple terminal emulator program and used it to dial out to the county public library system, which offered free email addresses. Once I got it working, I carefully coiled up my custom serial cable and a phone cord of sufficient length in a plastic bag and took them to school with me. Just before lunch near the end of calculus class I quietly got up and strung the cable across the room to a phone jack. Then I went back to my desk, typed in the AT command to start dialing, and grinned as the screech of the modem brought the lecture to an early conclusion. Of course my teacher was annoyed, but even he had join the laughter when I told him that I was just checking my email.
Even funnier if you knew that I spent most of my lunch hours either in my Physics teacher’s classroom playing spades (he taught the Calculus class right after lunch, which was convenient), or in the library where they had some terminals plugged into the card catalog system. You could break out of their telnet session and then telnet to wherever you wanted, so I often spent my lunch hour by checking my email (and then logging into a bulletin board to play the door games), so the modem wasn’t actually necessary.
Incidentally, I changed the title on https://archive.org/details/hp48gp-calculator to “HP48G+”, as you suggested. Changing the identifier is a rather more fraught process akin to deleting the item and reuploading it, so I’ll let it be. And I bet the MAME driver is named “hp48gp”, so it’s fine.
Now that you mention it, I don’t recall where I sourced the connector for the serial port. There was nothing unusual about it the connector, but I no longer remember that detail; oh well.
The funniest thing I ever did back then was to hook up the serial port to a 1200 baud modem with lots of big red blinkenlights. I found a simple terminal emulator program and used it to dial out to the county public library system, which offered free email addresses. Once I got it working, I carefully coiled up my custom serial cable and a phone cord of sufficient length in a plastic bag and took them to school with me. Just before lunch near the end of calculus class I quietly got up and strung the cable across the room to a phone jack. Then I went back to my desk, typed in the AT command to start dialing, and grinned as the screech of the modem brought the lecture to an early conclusion. Of course my teacher was annoyed, but even he had join the laughter when I told him that I was just checking my email.
Even funnier if you knew that I spent most of my lunch hours either in my Physics teacher’s classroom playing spades (he taught the Calculus class right after lunch, which was convenient), or in the library where they had some terminals plugged into the card catalog system. You could break out of their telnet session and then telnet to wherever you wanted, so I often spent my lunch hour by checking my email (and then logging into a bulletin board to play the door games), so the modem wasn’t actually necessary.
Incidentally, I changed the title on https://archive.org/details/hp48gp-calculator to “HP48G+”, as you suggested. Changing the identifier is a rather more fraught process akin to deleting the item and reuploading it, so I’ll let it be. And I bet the MAME driver is named “hp48gp”, so it’s fine.