Ancient Web: HolyJoe Kept HP Calculator Club Lore Alive

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Joe Horn's homepage offers a genuinely startling menu: poetry, Catholic homilies, outdoor trips, and programming resources for old Hewlett-Packard calculators.

Visit HolyJoe.net

The banner says 'Since 1995', which helps explain the site's unusual shape. Instead of being a profile centered on a single professional identity, it is a long-maintained arrangement of subjects its owner actually cares about.

One branch offers a Poem of the Week and literary archives. Another contains religious writing, including explanations of Catholic clothing and devotional practices. A third opens up an entire niche of programmable calculator history.

A library for people who programmed pockets

The HP-71 collection links to what Horn calls the LEXicon, an index of HP-71B extension files with command, token, and syntax information. There is also a list of notable lexfiles and an explanation of the calculator's INTEGRAL algorithm.

That is not ordinary nostalgia for a vintage gadget. It is documentation meant to help someone interpret an old computing environment where programs, add-on modules, and command tokens mattered.

The site's PPC Flashback Page is even more clearly preservation. It indexes articles from Hewlett-Packard programmable-pocket-calculator enthusiast publications of the 1970s and early 1980s. Entries include a 1975 discussion of HP calculator naming, a 1977 item about the HP-65 in space, programming jokes, and essays from the PPC Journal.

Each item carries author and issue details, making the page a practical bibliography and a small surviving door into pre-Web hobbyist publishing. The enthusiasts behind these old calculators built communities with club numbers, paper newsletters, and long discussions about how much code could fit into a machine you held in one hand.

The site map helps readers navigate Horn's separate identities. The personal tone never disappears even when the subject becomes quite technical.

Some older inner pages may now be unreachable, so the visible indexes should not be mistaken for a guarantee that every referenced document survives in full.

The value of HolyJoe is the mixture: a single person's hobbies, vocation, humor, and computing knowledge occupying the same address for decades. If a modern platform demanded Horn pick a single content niche, it would probably discard the interesting half.

Browse the calculator publications index or the full homepage.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.