CONTROLLING A GRAPHICS PLOTTER WITH A HAND-HELD PROGRAMMABLE CALCULATOR

A Hewlett-Packard plotter module is described that transforms the HP-41C microcomputer with Hewlett-Packard Interface Loop (HP-IL) into a computer graphics instrument. The module is an 8K-word unit (word length is 10 bits) which adds 52 microcoded commands to the HP-41C's function set, along with a sophisticated interactive plotting program written in RPN (reverse Polish notation). Many of the command names and functions are based on the graphic command sets of the HP 9845 Computer and the HP-85 Personal Computer. This allows users familiar with these products to master the plotter module's commands quickly. Plotting primitives, bar-code primitives and interactive plotting program are described.