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History

On April 3, 1995, Emmet P. Gray,¹ an American programmer, at the time civilian employee at the US Army, now adjunct professor at the Texas A&M University,² released WRPN 1.0 (16-bit), a public domain open-source software written in Borland C++ 4.0 for early versions of Microsoft Windows.³⁴⁵⁶

As of September 2024 the project is still in active development, and the latest WRPN 7.1.1 was released on August 26, 2024, for modern operating systems with Java installed, and as a mobile application for Android. Source code is available in C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET and Java.⁷

Features

WRPN simulates almost all of the functions of HP-16C:

• RPN (Reverse Polish notation) input support
• Floating point, Decimal, Hexadecimal, Octal and Binary modes
• Word sizes from 1–64 bits per word
• Signed math
• Logical operators
• Bitwise operators
• 32 storage registers
• 4 position stack
• 203 lines of program memory

JRPN

In 2019 Bill Foote, an American software engineer and ex-Lead of the Sun Microsystems' standardization of interactive technologies for Blu-ray and other TV platforms,⁸ created the JRPN (JOVIAL Reverse Polish Notation Calculators), an open-source HP-16C simulator, forked from WRPN 6.0.2 in Java, but with all of the text set to be rendered from vector fonts (instead of the bitmap font used in WRPN), and licensed it under the free Apache License.⁹

I always wanted a 16C, but I never really needed it, and I was a starving student at the time :-) WRPN works great on Android, but the UI uses images that were created back when screen resolutions weren't so high, so I dropped Emmet a line, and re-did some of the UI and published that as what I'm now calling "Legacy JRPN".

— Bill Foote, Why Another Calculator Simulator?, jrpn.jovial.com

During the COVID-19 pandemic Foote fully rewrote JRPN code in Flutter and licensed it under GPLv3.¹⁰ JRPN is available now in two variants, 15C and 16C (simulating HP-15C and HP-16C accordingly), for Android, Linux, Mac OS, Windows and as a web application.¹¹

Also there is another RPN calculator of the same name, developed by William Giel as freeware proprietary software. It has been last released in 1999.¹²

Gallery

See also

• Comparison of software calculators

External links

• WRPN Users Guide
• WRPN 16c on Google Play
• JRPN 16c Android package at the F-Droid repository
• RPN/RPL Implementations

References

1. "Emmet P. Gray – author detailed information". www.hpcalc.org. Retrieved September 7, 2024. https://www.hpcalc.org/authors/1167 ↩

2. "About Me". www.emmet-gray.com. Retrieved September 6, 2024. https://www.emmet-gray.com/AboutMe.html ↩

3. "WRPN 16-bit 1.0 – detailed information". www.hpcalc.org. Retrieved September 6, 2024. https://www.hpcalc.org/details/3698 ↩

4. "WRPN Calculator". www.emmet-gray.com. Retrieved September 7, 2024. https://www.emmet-gray.com/Articles/WRPN.html ↩

5. "HP Calculator Simulations". www.hpmuseum.org. Retrieved September 7, 2024. https://www.hpmuseum.org/simulate/simulate.htm ↩

6. "HP-related Programs for the PC". www.hpcalc.org. Retrieved September 7, 2024. https://www.hpcalc.org/other/pc/ ↩

7. "WRPN Source Code 7.1.1 – detailed information". www.hpcalc.org. Retrieved September 7, 2024. https://www.hpcalc.org/details/9304 ↩

8. "Bill Foote's Home Page". jovial.com. Retrieved September 6, 2024. https://jovial.com/bill.html ↩

9. "Legacy Jovial RPN". legacy.jrpn.jovial.com. Retrieved September 6, 2024. https://legacy.jrpn.jovial.com/ ↩

10. Foote, Bill (September 3, 2024), zathras/jrpn, retrieved September 6, 2024 https://github.com/zathras/jrpn/ ↩

11. "JRPN Calculators". jrpn.jovial.com. Retrieved September 6, 2024. https://jrpn.jovial.com/ ↩

12. "JRPN – the Scientific Calculator for Java". www.kcmultimedia.com. Retrieved September 7, 2024. http://www.kcmultimedia.com/jrpn/ ↩