The HP 49/50 series are

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California ...

(HP) manufactured

graphing calculator Graphing Calculator may refer to: * Graphing calculators, calculators that are able to display and/or analyze mathematical function graphs * NuCalc, a computer software program able to perform many graphing calculator functions * Grapher, th ...

s. They are the successors of the

HP 48 series The HP 48 is a series of graphing calculators designed and produced by Hewlett-Packard from 1990 until 2003. The series includes the HP 48S, HP 48SX, HP 48G, HP 48GX, and HP 48G+, the G models being expanded and ...

. There are five calculators in the 49/50 series of HP graphing calculators. These calculators have both algebraic and RPN entry modes, and can perform numeric and symbolic calculations using the built-in Computer Algebra System (CAS), which is an improved ALG48 and

Erable Erable is a computer algebra system (CAS) for a family of Hewlett-Packard graphing scientific calculators of the HP 40, 48 and HP 49/50 series. History Originally named ''ALGB'' in 1993, it was developed by the French mathematician f ...

combination from the HP 48 series. It is widely considered the greatest calculator ever designed for engineers, scientists, and surveyors. It has advanced functions suitable for applications in

mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

linear algebra Linear algebra is the branch of mathematics concerning linear equations such as :a_1x_1+\cdots +a_nx_n=b, linear maps such as :(x_1, \ldots, x_n) \mapsto a_1x_1+\cdots +a_nx_n, and their representations in vector spaces and through matrix (mathemat ...

physics Physics is the scientific study of matter, its Elementary particle, fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge whi ...

statistical analysis Statistical inference is the process of using data analysis to infer properties of an underlying probability distribution.Upton, G., Cook, I. (2008) ''Oxford Dictionary of Statistics'', OUP. . Inferential statistical analysis infers properties of ...

numerical analysis Numerical analysis is the study of algorithms that use numerical approximation (as opposed to symbolic computation, symbolic manipulations) for the problems of mathematical analysis (as distinguished from discrete mathematics). It is the study of ...

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

, and others. Although out of production, its popularity has led to high prices on the used market.

HP 49G

The HP 49G (F1633A, F1896A), was released in August 1999. The 49G incorporated many of the most powerful interface and mathematics tools available on the

into the

firmware In computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computer, computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and the development of both computer hardware, h ...

of the new 49G, including the ability to easily decompile and compile both

SysRPL RPL is a handheld calculator operating system and application programming language used on Hewlett-Packard's scientific graphing RPN (Reverse Polish Notation) calculators of the HP 28, 48, 49 and 50 series, but it is also usable on non ...

and

Saturn Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second largest in the Solar System, after Jupiter. It is a gas giant, with an average radius of about 9 times that of Earth. It has an eighth the average density of Earth, but is over 95 tim ...

assembly code on the unit. The 49G was the first HP calculator to use

flash memory Flash memory is an Integrated circuit, electronic Non-volatile memory, non-volatile computer memory storage medium that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. The two main types of flash memory, NOR flash and NAND flash, are named for t ...

and have an upgradable

. In addition, it had a hard sliding case as opposed to the soft pouches supplied with the HP 48 series. Almost the same hardware is also used by the HP 39G and HP 40G. The last officially supported firmware update for the 49G calculator was 1.18, but several unofficial firmware versions were released by the developers. The final firmware version was 1.19-6. Several firmware versions for the successor hp 49g+ and HP 50g calculators have also been released in builds intended for PC emulation software that lacked full utilization of the successors'

ARM In human anatomy, the arm refers to the upper limb in common usage, although academically the term specifically means the upper arm between the glenohumeral joint (shoulder joint) and the elbow joint. The distal part of the upper limb between ...

CPU. Until at least firmware version 2.09, those emulator builds could be installed on the original HP 49G as well. In 2003, the CAS

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

of the 49G firmware was released under the

LGPL The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

. In addition, this release included an interactive geometry program and some commands to allow compatibility with certain programs written for the newer 49g+ calculator. Due to licensing restrictions, the recompiled

cannot be redistributed.

hp 49g+

In August 2003, Hewlett-Packard released the hp 49g+ (F2228A). This unit had metallic gold coloration and was backward compatible with the HP 49G.It was designed and manufactured by

Kinpo Electronics Barry Lam (; born 24 April 1949) is a Taiwanese billionaire businessman, and the founder and chairman of Quanta Computer.

for HP. This calculator featured an entirely new processor architecture,

USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard, developed by USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), for digital data transmission and power delivery between many types of electronics. It specifies the architecture, in particular the physical ...

( Mini-B) and

IrDA IrDA is a wireless standard designed for exchanging data using infrared (IR). Infrared ports for this purpose have been implemented in portable electronic devices such as mobile telephones, laptops, cameras, printers, and medical devices. The mai ...

( IrCOMM)

infrared Infrared (IR; sometimes called infrared light) is electromagnetic radiation (EMR) with wavelengths longer than that of visible light but shorter than microwaves. The infrared spectral band begins with the waves that are just longer than those ...

communication, memory expansion via an SD ( SDSC/ MMC) card, and a slightly larger screen, as well as other improvements over the previous model. The calculator system did not run directly on the new

processor, but rather on an emulation layer for the older

processors found in previous HP calculators. In principle, the firmware for the calculator is identical to that for the 49G, but it gets automatically patched in the course of development to replace some code sequences by special virtual " Saturn+" instructions which bypass the emulation and run natively on the underlying ARM processor in order to improve the calculator's speed. This allowed the 49g+ to maintain binary-level compatibility with most of the programs written for the HP 49G calculator, as well as source code-level compatibility with many written for the HP 48 series. Despite the emulation, the 49g+ was still much faster than any older model of HP calculator. The speed increase over the HP 49G is around 3–7 times depending on the task. It is even possible to run programs written for the ARM processor thus bypassing the emulation layer completely. A port of the

GNU C compiler The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is a collection of compilers from the GNU Project that support various programming languages, hardware architectures, and operating systems. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) distributes GCC as free software ...

is also available (see HPGCC below).

hp 48gII

The hp 48gII (F2226A), which was announced on 20 October 2003, was not a replacement for the

as its name suggested. Rather it was a 49g+, also with an ARM processor (unlike the HP 48G), but with reduced memory, no expansion via an SD memory card, lower clock speed, a smaller screen, and a non-flashable firmware. This calculator seems to target users that desire mathematical capability, but have no desire to install many programs. The original 2003 version had 128 KB RAM and ran on 3 AAA batteries, whereas the second 2007 version (based on the Apple V2 platform) needs four AAA batteries and comes with 256 KB RAM, added a USB ( Mini-B) port and features a better keyboard.

HP 50g

The HP 50g (F2229A) is the latest calculator in the 49/50 series, introduced in 2006. The most apparent change is a revised color scheme, returning the unit to a more traditional HP calculator appearance. Using black plastic for the entire body, white, orange and yellow are used for function shift keys. The back shell is textured more deeply than the 49g+ to provide a more secure grip. HP 50G azul

In 2009/2010, a blue and white color scheme variant (NW240AA) specifically tailored for high-contrast was introduced as well. It was also designed to aid color-blind users. In 2011/2012, a slightly different blue and white color scheme was introduced. The form and size of the calculator shell is identical to the 49g+ series, but four

AAA batteries The AAA battery (or triple-A battery) is a standard size of dry cell battery. One or more AAA batteries are commonly used in low-drain portable electronic devices. A zinc–carbon battery in this size is designated by IEC as R03, by ANSI C1 ...

are used as opposed to three in previous models. In addition to all the features of the 49g+, the 50g also includes the full equation library found in the HP 48G series (also available for the 49g+ with firmware 2.06 and above), as well as the periodic table library originally available as a plug-in card for the 48S series, as of firmware 2.15/ 2.16 (the latest, as of 2015), and has a 3.3 V TTL-level asynchronous serial port in addition to

and

USB Mini-B The initial versions of the USB standard specified connectors that were easy to use and that would have high life spans; revisions of the standard added smaller connectors useful for compact portable devices. Higher-speed development of the USB ...

ports of the 49g+. Like the 49g+, the range of the infrared port has been limited to about 10 cm (4 inches). Like for the 49g+, the firmware is in principle identical to that for the 49G, but gets automatically patched in the course of development. The asynchronous serial port is not a true

RS-232 In telecommunications, RS-232 or Recommended Standard 232 is a standard introduced in 1960 for serial communication transmission of data. It formally defines signals connecting between a ''DTE'' (''data terminal equipment'') such as a compu ...

port as it uses different voltage levels and a non-standard connector. An external converter/adapter is required to interface with RS-232 equipment. The keyboard, the most often criticized feature of the 49g+ calculators, uses the new design introduced on the very last 49g+ calculators (hinged keys) to eliminate previous problems. A worldwide announcement regarding the availability of this calculator was made by HP in September 2006, and official details were available on the

HP calculators HP calculators are various calculators manufactured by the Hewlett-Packard company over the years. Their desktop models included the HP 9800 series, while their handheld models started with the HP-35. Their focus has been on high-end scienti ...

webpage. The calculator was officially discontinued in 2015. It was HP's last calculator to support RPL, later calculators like the HP Prime support RPN only, although in a variant named Advanced RPN.

Programming

The HP 49/50 series of calculators support both algebraic and a stack-based programming language named RPL, a combination of

Reverse Polish Notation Reverse Polish notation (RPN), also known as reverse Łukasiewicz notation, Polish postfix notation or simply postfix notation, is a mathematical notation in which operators ''follow'' their operands, in contrast to prefix or Polish notation ...

(RPN) and

Lisp Lisp (historically LISP, an abbreviation of "list processing") is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized Polish notation#Explanation, prefix notation. Originally specified in the late 1950s, ...

. RPL adds the concepts of lists and functions to

stack Stack may refer to: Places * Stack Island, an island game reserve in Bass Strait, south-eastern Australia, in Tasmania’s Hunter Island Group * Blue Stack Mountains, in Co. Donegal, Ireland People * Stack (surname) (including a list of people ...

-based programming, allowing the programmer to pass unevaluated code as arguments to functions, or return unevaluated code from a function by leaving it on the stack. The highest level language is User RPL, consisting of sequences of built-in postfix operations, optionally including loops and conditionals. Every User RPL command checks the stack for its particular arguments and returns an error if they are incorrect or not present. Below User RPL is System RPL (SysRPL). Most System RPL commands lack argument checking and are defined only for specific argument types (e.g. short integer vs. long integer), making System RPL programs run dramatically faster than equivalent User RPL ones. In addition, System RPL includes many advanced functions that are not available in User RPL. System RPL programs can be created without the use of PC software (although it is available), thanks to the calculator's built-in compiler, MASD. MASD also can compile

assembly language In computing, assembly language (alternatively assembler language or symbolic machine code), often referred to simply as assembly and commonly abbreviated as ASM or asm, is any low-level programming language with a very strong correspondence bet ...

and, with the latest firmware revision for the 49g+/50g,

ARMv4T ARM (stylised in lowercase as arm, formerly an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines and originally Acorn RISC Machine) is a family of RISC instruction set architectures (ISAs) for computer processors. Arm Holdings develops the ISAs and licen ...

assembly language on the calculator itself. Many tools exist to assist programmers and make the calculator a powerful programming environment.

assembly, and, on the 49g+/50g, ARM assembly and C, are also programmable using desktop based compilers. See also the programs available for the

. No model of this series is programmable in HP PPL.

HPGCC for the 49g+/50g

HPGCC is an implementation of the GCC compiler, released under the

GNU GPL The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

. It is now mainly targeted at the ARM-based 49g+/50g calculators. Previous versions of HPGCC supported the other ARM-based calculator models (the 48gII, and the hp 39g+/ HP 39gs/ HP 40gs), but this was removed due to lack of interest and compatibility issues. Formally, HPGCC is a

cross-compiler A cross compiler is a compiler capable of creating executable code for a platform other than the one on which the compiler is running. For example, a compiler that runs on a PC but generates code that runs on Android devices is a cross compil ...

; it compiles code for the ARM-based HP calculators, but runs on a PC rather than the target system. The latest version of HPGCC offers many enhancements from earlier versions. Most notably, the compiled code is now in ARM Thumb mode by default, resulting in great reduction in code size with little performance hit. Besides implementing most of

ANSI The American National Standards Institute (ANSI ) is a private nonprofit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. The organiz ...

C, there are device-specific libraries that allow access to things like the calculator's RPN stack, memory and

piezoelectric Piezoelectricity (, ) is the electric charge that accumulates in certain solid materials—such as crystals, certain ceramics, and biological matter such as bone, DNA, and various proteins—in response to applied stress (mechanics), mechanical s ...

buzzer. The GCC compiler itself is the property of the Free Software Foundation, and they state that its use does not impose any particular licensing restrictions on any of its output. However, the libraries included with HPGCC, including routines necessary to actually invoke any HPGCC-compiled program on an actual calculator, are released under a modified GPL license, contrary to GCC on many other platforms which use a more

permissive license A permissive software license, sometimes also called BSD-like or BSD-style license, is a free-software license which instead of copyleft protections, carries only minimal restrictions on how the software can be used, modified, and redistributed, ...

for their libraries. Thus any programs that link against them can only be distributed if they are also released under the GPL (with an exception for "non-profit" software). Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X versions are available for download. The Windows version also includes a version of Programmer's Notepad for a basic IDE.

Emulators

There are several

emulators In computing, an emulator is hardware or software that enables one computer system (called the ''host'') to behave like another computer system (called the ''guest''). An emulator typically enables the host system to run software or use perip ...

available for the HP 49G calculator. A version of EMU48 is available in the Debug4x IDE that allows emulation of most of the features of the 49g+/50g, but will not execute any ARM-based code. An ARM-based emulator, x49gp, has been released and allows the true emulation of the 49g+/50g ARM processor and successfully runs HPGCC 2 and 3 compiled programs. The emulator is only available for

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

and Mac OS X and must be compiled from the source. (See README.QUICKSTART for details.) The commercial version of the application m48 also supports HP 49G. So far, there are no 49g+/50g emulators for smartphones with the exception of HP 50g for iPhone and iPad released in October 2012. An emulator for

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

Windows Mobile Windows Mobile is a discontinued mobile operating system developed by Microsoft for smartphones and personal digital assistants (PDA). Designed to be the portable equivalent of the Windows desktop OS in the emerging Mobile device, mobile/port ...

(PPC, smartphones) is available. Other 49G/49g+/50g emulators for Android (without ARM support). In 2012, Hewlett-Packard released an emulator named ''HP 50g Virtual Calculator'' (version 3.1.29/3.1.30 with firmware 2.16 and support for the StreamSmart 410) for Windows.

Firmware updates

The 49/50 series allows the user to update the firmware to gain enhanced features or bug fixes. Official firmware updates are released by Hewlett-Packard. Unsupported unofficial firmware updates are also available at sites such as hpcalc.org.

References

External links

* Official HP support for , , , * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Hp 49 50 Series Computer algebra systems Graphing calculators 49 de:HP-49G