The HP 67 programmable calculator 08/04/16 10:07 PM

The HP 67 programmable calculator

During this year's VCFE which took place in Munich as every year, I had the
opportunity to buy a HP 67 programmable calculator (as well as an HP 41C) in
unknown state at the VCFE flea market (and it can not be stated often enough, I
have to give my wife a kiss here since she not only never complains about the
fact that I spent far too much money for very obsolete calculators and
computers but instead is as happy as I am about new old machines we get -
thank you, Rikka, you are truly wonderful!).

The HP 67 was HP's flagship programmable calculator in the late 1970s and the
only competitor to Texas Instruments' TI-59. It features 224 merged program
steps and 26 data registers (which is less than the TI-59 offers) and a built-in
magnetic card reader/writer. As a true HP calculator it is a RPN machine in
contrast to the TI-59 which uses an algebraic input method called AOS.

The following sections describe my adventures in getting this calculator

running again. What I bought was the bare calculator in unknown condition
without batteries and without a power supply.

Repairing:

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Opening the HP 67 calculator is a bit tricky and it requires some patience to do it

without harming the machine. All in all there are six screws holding the two parts
of the enclosure together. Two screws are underneath the two rubber feet at the
bottom of the machine, two screws are under the metal sticker showing the
conversion factors (use extreme care and a very sharp knife to carefully remove
this sticker without damaging it) while the last two screws are under the two
rectangular plugs located on the top of the calculator. These can be removed with a
sharp knife, too, and a bit of patience.

After removing the bottom plate of the

enclosure you will see the interior of the
calculator as shown in the picture on the
right. On the left hand side the CPU
board can be seen, in the middle the
battery compartment can be found while
the card reader/writer is located on the
right hand side.

The picture on the left shows the

display which is composed from three
individual LED display strips
containing five digits each. Below the
display the display drivers can be seen
as well as the two slider strips for the
power and the run/program switch.

The connection between the card

reader/writer and the CPU board is
established by a long and quite fragile
printed circuit board which holds the card
reader interface on its right side (see
above) and some connectors on its left
side which plug directly into the CPU
board.

The CPU board is shown on the left -

on the left side the connectors for the
card reader/writer can be seen while the
connectors on the bottom make the
connection with the keyboard PCB of
the calculator.

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The keyboard and display circuitry and

mechanics are mounted on a large
common printed circuit board which can
be seen in the picture on the right. The
keys and the switches are separated by a
rather thin sheet of plastic.

As can be seen in the picture on the

left, the calculator once suffered from
dying batteries - the keyboard shows
signs of corrosion (clearly visible by
the green deposits on the plastic sheet).
I took the opportunity of having the
calculator taken apart to thoroughly
clean the keyboard and even apply
some silicone oil to protect the switches
from further corrosion.
Nearly all calculators of this age show a
defunct card reader/writer which is due to
the rubber used in the card transport
mechanism which turns into something
rather ghastly over time. Therefore it is
necessary to replace the transport wheel
by something else. To accomplish this it
is necessary to remove the deteriorated
wheel from the card reader/writer. Shown
in the picture on the right is the white
plastic axle holding the wheel. This axle
can be carefully removed using a screw
driver to twist it and a pair of needle nose
pliers to pull it out of the card
reader/writer.
To get to this point, the card reader has to be disassembled which seems to be quite
easy - there are six screws holding its upper and lower half together (five screws
are accessible from the bottom of the device, one is mounted from top). Please
note: There are four small and precious plastic balls as well as a very fragile and
important small plastic wheel on the bottom half of the reader/writer which tend to
get lost while opening the device!

I strongly suggest working on a very clean table - ideally inside a tub - to make
sure that none of these parts gets lost! I personally secure the balls and the small
(tiny!) wheel with a strip of duct tape and then remove them altogether with the
tape storing them in a secure place until it is time to reinsert them.

The four plastic balls will engage four control switches which are used to detect the

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presence of a card, its write-protect status, etc. while the tiny plastic wheel acts as
the counterpart of the big rubber wheel pulling the card through the mechanism. In
almost every case there will be some residue of the large, deteriorated rubber wheel
on the small plastic wheel which has to be cleaned very carefully and very
thoroughly. Even small amounts of debris will contaminate your precious magnetic
card strips and will result in a lot of problems reading and writing cards!

The deteriorated driving wheel is

shown on the left - the rubber has
completely decomposed - in fact I
could peel it off just by rubbing with a
finger on it. It takes some time to
thoroughly remove any residue of this
rubber from the wheel but it is
necessary in the process of replacing
the wheel by something else, so take
some time for this procedure.

How to replace the deteriorated rubber

which has just been completely removed
from the wheel? The standard procedure
is to get some silicone tubing as it is used
in model cars for the fuel lines with
proper inner and outer diameters (about
6.3 mm). Unfortunately I could not find
something suitable and had to think of
something else. Fortunately a friend of
mine gave me a large bag of rubber
tubing as shown on the right. Normally
this was used to insulate soldered wires in
telephone exchanges and is of such high a
quality that it still looks and feels like
new despite its age of about 30 or 40
years.
Of course these tubings have an outer
diameter being too small to fit for this
purpose but it is possible to put three of
these tubings one over another which
yields a nearly perfect outer diameter.
To assure that this contraption does not
fall apart in an instant, I glued them
together using epoxy glue. The picture
in the left shows the drying tubings
mounted on the wheel but not cut to the
final length.

The picture on the right shows the final

wheel with its three layers of rubber
tubing after drying and after cutting the
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excess length away with a very sharp

knife. The wheel works really great and
very reliable although I used a different
approach on a later restoration of another
card reader/writer after I finally found
some silicone tubing in a local model
maker shop - it is just easier to have a
single tube instead of fiddling with three
at the same time. :-)

After I completed the repair of the card reader/writer, I built a replacement battery
pack using some off the shelf NiMH accumulators. Using a power supply I found
in my collection of miscellaneous spare parts I could then switch on the calculator
and it worked like a charm from the very first moment on. Thus I decided to take it
with me when I went to the USA in May 2007 to attend the OpenVMS boot camp
since leaving the house without a real :-) pocket calculator is no option at all and I
thought I might need something to play with during the endless hours of boring
flights.

When I checked in they were puzzled by the HP 67 dangling from my belt and
decided to check it thoroughly - the funny thing is that one man had a look at it and
said: "What a beauty you have! In the 1980s I saw a lot of these but I haven't seen
them for years!" - so even the security people at the airport know about HP pocket
calculators.

About in the middle of the week I would stay in the USA the card reader/writer
operation became random and finally the reader/writer stopped working at all. Thus
I had to take the HP 67 apart again after coming home to determine the source of
the problem.

It turned out that the worm gear

mounted on the shaft of the motor had
turned loose resulting in insufficient
torque to pull the card through the
mechanism. The picture on the left
shows the removed motor with its
worm gear still mounted.

Just gently pulling the worm gear

separated it from the shaft of the motor,
so I had to think about a way to get both
parts fixed together reliably. As nearly
always I decided to use epoxy glue - I
mixed a very (very! :-) ) tiny amount of
epoxy glue and put a fraction of a

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fraction of a ml into the borehole of the

worm gear using a syringe. Then I
pushed the worm gear onto the shaft of
the motor and waited for the glue to
harden. After reassembling the calculator
again it now works flawlessly for quite
some time while I am reading and writing
quite a lot of cards, so the repair attempts
were very successful.

Example programs
Now having a working HP 67 in near mint condition (apart from some minor
scratches on the keyboard) I had to write some programs for it. I have to admit it
(and it is not that easy for me :-) ) that I like the HP way of programming a pocket
calculator more than the Texas Instruments way (altough I normally preferred my
trusty old TI-59 for my everyday calculations).

While the method of programming the TI-59 quite closely resembles programming
in machine language with every byte/word (name it as you like) occupying its own
memory location without any connection to other memory cells, the HP
programming methodology is more like assembly language programming as a
simple example will make clear.

Assume that you want to perform an unconditional jump, a GTO, to a label called A:
On the TI-59 this would occupy two memory locations, one containing 61, the
opcode for GTO and the other one containing 11, resembling the label A. When you
edit a program like this you always have to keep track of the meaning of the
opcodes while scrolling through the memory. Seeing the 11 it is not clear whether it
is the destination of a GTO or the name of a LBL, etc.

HP's way of programming takes the instruction as a whole and saves it into a single
"line" of code (which still consists of several bytes) which will be displayed at once
and not piece by piece. The same instruction GTO A will look like 22 11. 22 is the
GTO opcode while 11 is the label A. In this case the whole instruction can be seen at
once - you do not have to scroll up and down to understand what is going on. This
is what HP called merged instructions.

In the following some rather short and ugly example programs are shown to give an
impression of the way the HP 67 can be programmed.

The following short (and rather unelegant) example program calculates the so
called Ulam-series which is defined like this (for natural numbers):

If the number is even, divide it by two.

If the number is odd, multiply it by three and add one.
Repeat this sequence until 1 is reached.

It is not known whether all numbers will eventually yield 1 during this process, but
no counterexamples have been found so far. It is also not known if there is a

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general rule to determine the necessary steps to reach 1.

The following program expects a number in the X-register of the stack and can be
started by pressing A. It will then display the elements of the Ulam-series in
succession and will terminate when the series reaches 1. The last number being
displayed is the number of steps which was necessary to yield 1 for the given initial
value.

001 31 25 11 LBL A Program start

002 23 00 DSP 0 We don't want any decimal places
003 00 0 Initialize the counter
004 33 01 STO 1 stored in R1
005 35 53 RDN Restore the initial value
006 31 25 12 LBL B This is the header of the loop
007 33 00 STO 0 Store the value
008 01 1 and subtract one
009 51 -
010 31 51 X=0 Have we reached the end?
011 22 14 GTO D Yes, so that's it.
012 01 1 No: Increment the counter
013 33 61 01 STO+ 1 stored in R1
014 34 00 RCL 0 Get the original value
015 35 72 PAUSE Display it
016 02 2 Divide by two
017 81 /
018 32 83 FRAC Check for a remainder
019 31 51 X=0
020 22 13 GTO C No remainder, so it was even
021 34 00 RCL 0 It was odd,
022 03 3 so multiply by 3
023 71 *
024 01 1 and add 1
025 61 +
026 22 12 GTO B Repeat the loop
027 31 25 13 LBL C An even number will end here
028 34 00 RCL 0 Get the value
029 02 2 Divide it by two
030 81 /
031 22 12 GTO B and repeat the loop
032 31 25 14 LBL D This is the end...
033 34 01 RCL 1 Display the counter R1
034 84 R/S and terminate the program

The next program is a bit more sophisticated and not as unelegant as the prior one
(although there is quite some room for improvements). It calculates the prime
factors for a given value which is expected in the X-register on the stack.

To run the program place the number to be factored in the X-register and press A.
Whenever a factor is found the calculation will end, showing the factor. To resume
calculation press R/S until 1 will be displayed denoting that there are no more
factors.

001 31 25 11 LBL A Begin of program

002 33 00 STO 0 Remember the value to be factored

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003 02 2 We will divide by 2 first

004 33 02 STO 2 ...and remember it
005 81 /
006 32 83 FRAC Was there a remainder?
007 31 51 X=0
008 22 13 GTO C No? -> So 2 is a divisor
009 34 00 RCL 0 Determine the end of the division loop
010 31 54 SQRT(X) By using the square root of the value
011 31 83 INT ...of course only the integer part
012 33 01 STO 1 Remember this in R1
013 03 3 The loop will start with 3
014 33 02 STO 2 which is stored in R2
015 31 25 12 LBL B This is the top of the loop
016 34 00 RCL 0 Divide the value by the loop variable
017 34 02 RCL 2
018 81 /
019 32 83 FRAC ...and check for a remainder
020 31 51 X=0 If there was no remainder, then R2
021 22 13 GTO C contains a divisor
022 02 2 Otherwise increment the loop counter
023 33 61 02 STO+ 2 by two
024 34 01 RCL 1 And check for the end of the loop
025 34 02 RCL 2
026 32 71 X<=Y OK, the loop has to iterate once more
027 22 12 GTO B So jump to the header of the loop
028 34 00 RCL 0 We found no divisors, so it is prime, store
029 33 02 STO 2 it in the divisor register and fall through
030 31 25 13 LBL C When we found a divisor we will end here
031 34 02 RCL 2 Fetch the divisor
032 84 R/S and display it
033 34 00 RCL 0 Now fetch the original value
034 35 52 X<->Y Swap X and Y,
035 81 / divide them and
036 22 11 GTO A restart the routine

All in all the HP 67 is a bit faster than the mighty TI-59 - although it lacks the large
memory of the TI-59 and the ROM modules the TI-59 supports, the ease of
programming makes the HP 67 more fun to play with (at least for me as I have to
admit). A bit disturbing is the habit of HP calculators of not switching off the
display during calculations resulting in what HP called "blurry display" - a bunch
of flickering nonsense digits. The faint glowing "C" in the left most digit of a TI-59
is far more elegant and saves some power, too. The cards of the HP 67 (and its
successors like the HP 41C) have only half of the data density of the TI-59 cards
(two tracks compared with four tracks). Taking all this into account, it is a close
race between the TI-59 and the HP 67 and if I had to decide which one to take on a
lonely spot I would try to take both. :-) The HP 67 for the fun of programming it
and the TI-59 for its large memory and its ROM modules.

Other resources on the net

As with all HP calculators, the main site on the internet is The Museum of
HP Calculators which contains an incredible amount of background
information on these great calculators.

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ulmann@vaxman.de
05-JUN-2007
webmaster@vaxman.de

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