Paul Courbis

Paul Courbis, born on the 3rd of November 1967, is a French programmer, mostly known for reverse engineering the HP-28 and then the HP-48 series of calculator, and writing multiple articles and books disclosing his findings. These books had a surprising success in France.

Very soon, a team of enthusiasts formed, gathering around Maubert Electronique [http://www.maubert.com] , a small electronics shop in the Latin Quarter, and developing a large number of utilities and games (one of the most impressing one was Pacman for the 48, one of the first program using the hardware scrolling device of the 48). Most of these programs are still available today [http://www.hpcalc.org] , and can be traced back to the original reverse-engineering published by Paul Courbis.

Paul Courbis is presently the chief technical officer at the French Conseil d'État, he is also working during his spare time on a set of tools to help people administrating Alcatel's PABX (for the 4400 serie).

Bibliography

Many of the books being now out of print, Paul Courbis arranged for them to be available on-line:
* (PDF files).
* (PDF files).
* (PDF files).
* (PDF files).
* [http://www.lmet.fr/fiche.cgi?ref=PAUL&_ISBN=2-87892-007-4]
*

Other realisations

Published works

* A HP48 cite web | url=http://www.courbis.fr/spip.php?article82 | title = "emulator/decompiler" running on Unix/X.Window and used for automatizing the understanding of the 48g internals;
* Paul is also the conceptor of the website of the first french computer bookstore on the Internet : cite web | title="Le Monde en Tique" | url=http://www.lmet.fr
*, a set of tools to help people administrating an Alcatel 4400 PABX (website in construction)
* the cite web | url=http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=fr&q=+paul+courbis+show:Bhum5uNmT4E:g0Lnt7wn2WA:vdXfHFbQ9Gk&sa=N&cd=4&ct=rc&cs_p=http://software.inl.fr/releases/Hal-gk/hal-gk-2007-01-12.tar.bz2&cs_f=hal-gk-2007-01-12/AUTHORS#first | title="HTTP filtering module" for the cite web | url=http://software.inl.fr/trac/trac.cgi/wiki/HAL-GK | title="Hybrid Application Layer GateKeeper"
* some modules for sybtcl : cite web | url=http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=fr&q=+paul+courbis+show:eqddqv1Lud4:-b5Pij3x1KM:6zp9w-QK3ro&sa=N&cd=1&ct=rc&cs_p=ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-stable/All/sybtcl-3.0rc2_1.tbz&cs_f=bin/sp_who#first | title="sp_who" and cite web | url=http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=fr&q=+sybmon+courbis+show:bOb61y-CQtY:fbE5uDiCM7o:BjDNra0UYf8&sa=N&cd=1&ct=rc&cs_p=http://ftp5.ru.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/distfiles/sybtcl-3.0rc2.tar.gz&cs_f=sybtcl-3.0rc2/samples/sybmon#first | title="sybmon"

Unpublished works

* A expandable RPL interpretor written in Object-Oriented-C ;

See also

* HP-28
* HP-48
* Saturn (microprocessor)

External links

* [http://www.hpcalc.org/best.php HP Calculators software library]
* [http://www.hp-network.com/interviews/interview4/interview4.php Interview of Paul Courbis] (in French)
* [http://www.maubert.com/ Maubert Electronique]
* [http://www.courbis.fr Paul's web site] (in French)
* [http://english.courbis.fr Paul's web site] (an automated translation in English)
* [https://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-16/dc-16-speakers.html#Goodspeed Travis Goodspeed's lecture about "Voyage au centre de la HP28c/s" during the Defcon 16 conference (August 2008)]