The HP-41C Community and Synthetic Programming
A large users' community was built around the HP-41C. Enthusiasts around the world found new ways of programming, created their own expansion modules, and sped up the clock (see overclocking). Most of these activities were coordinated by the PPC club and its president, Richard J. Nelson. The PPC club produced the PPC ROM, a collection of highly optimized low-level programs.
One of the discoveries of the community was that it was possible to exploit a bug in the program editor to assign strange functions to keys. The most important function was known as the byte jumper, a way to step partially through programming instructions and edit them in ways that were not otherwise allowed. The use of the resulting instructions was called synthetic programming.
Through synthetic instructions, a user could access memory and special status flags reserved for the operating system, and do very strange things, including completely locking the machine. It was possible to create sounds or display characters, and create animations not officially supported by the operating system. The system flags were also accessed as low-level shortcuts to boolean programming techniques. Hewlett-Packard did not officially support synthetic programming, but neither did it do anything to prevent it, and eventually even provided internal documentation to the user groups.
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