The 82153A Optical Wand
The optical wand was a barcode reader shaped like a thick pen, and was designed to read lines of HP-proprietary standard barcodes into the calculator memory. The barcodes, printed in e.g. HP solutions books, could consist of programs, numeric or alphabetical constants, and even keypresses (letting the calculator be operated without using the keyboard) — useful for diagnosing calculators where the keyboard was suspected to be faulty.
Read more about this topic: HP-41 Extension Module
Famous quotes containing the words optical and/or wand:
“There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The wand is will; thou, fancy, saddle art,
Girt fast by memory; and while I spur
My horse, he spurs with sharp desire my heart;”
—Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586)