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:
“The convent, which belongs to the West as it does to the East, to antiquity as it does to the present time, to Buddhism and Muhammadanism as it does to Christianity, is one of the optical devices whereby man gains a glimpse of infinity.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“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)