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:
“It is said that a carpenter building a summer hotel here ... declared that one very clear day he picked out a ship coming into Portland Harbor and could distinctly see that its cargo was West Indian rum. A county historian avers that it was probably an optical delusion, the result of looking so often through a glass in common use in those days.”
—For the State of New Hampshire, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)