I want to share with you two tools I use a lot on some situation, where I need to write short manuals for co-worker or end-customers.

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We already discussed about Queue management solutions in the past, and I am always happy to write about it. Queue managers are not easy to implement, and there is a reson if IBM MQ Series is still a successful product. Some month ago, a big bank customer asked me to provide a small queue implementation to increase asynchronous internal processing of our payment solution.

The project had very strong contraints: I could not use existing queue system because they were not yet available, and I need to be able to provide microservice parallelism in a cloud-environent.

I have very little time to provide a solid solution, and re-inventing the wheel was not an option. Performance was important, but we plan to have a managable numbers of transactions per seconds, far behind modern cloud database capacity.

Challenge accepted.

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HP started designing handhelded calculators from 1968 until the end of ‘80. I buyed an HP-42S around 1993 but it has been designed near 1986.

Here I want to focus on the chip design of the 10C series, a compact set of calculator with programming abilities but with full numeric display. The HP-15C was introduced in 1982, in the full 8bit computer era, the same year of the C/64. Later model will feature a more mature “Saturn” processor. I will describe here this chip at the best of my abilities, because it sheds a light on how custom architecture was done around end of 1979.

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We installed Isso comment system one month ago. It is time to do some review. I will update this page in the next month to add more insights if they would occur to my mind. I chosed Isso for the following reasons:

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The HP-12C is the only HP RPN calculator which is still produced and sold, despite is was designed in 1980. The calculator is produced by a subsidary licensed by HP, and you can find it around 40$ in US and around 70€ in Europe/UK. There was designed more than 14 diferent revisions by HP.

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