Late yesterday (Friday) afternoon, I received the following private e-mail
concerning Equater!, a set of four calculators that we wrote for the HP3000
ten years ago:

> I've used this program for awhile, but only today discovered
>  that you helped write it.  Thanks for all the good work.
>  Have used it many times for mortgage & loan calculations.
>
>  I share an office with Barry Lake at Stanford.  Never
>  thought of asking him who wrote Equater!.
>
>  Keep up the good work of praising the MPE operating system.
>  Maybe Microsoft won't take over the world after all.  Are you
>  listening HP?

We used to aggressively give Equater! out to anyone who asked for it -- and
Robelle and Adager have generously distributed it to all of their HP3000
customers. But we haven't been giving it out nearly as frequently of late.
But that doesn't mean that the program doesn't have some real value.

Equater! is composed of four separate user-programmable calculators, a
financial calculator, a scientific calculator, a statistical calculator, and
a programmer's calculator. Each is at least as good as the best handheld
calculator.

Based on the above author's comment, and because it dawned on me that times
have changed, I put together a web page last night so that you can download
Equater! if you wish. The URL is:

     http://aics-research.com/equater.html

However, before you go to the trouble of downloading the program, type:

     :LISTF [log in to unmask]@,2

to see if you have the program on your machine. Equater! is on a great number
of HP3000s nowadays, although you may not be aware of it. If you don't have
it, I would suggest that you download it. We're constantly told by people how
much they've come to rely on it. And it is usable by anyone in your
organization that has access to a terminal or terminal emulator (the original
client/server/java-like/browsers) on their desk.

Equater! hasn't been updated since 1990, but that is nothing more than a
high-tech way of saying that the program seems to bug-free.

Wirt Atmar