Has anyone invented a way to use a PC (or Linux or a Mac) to emulate
an HP-IB drive for the purposes of providing mass storage to an HP85
or HP87 computer? I know such a thing exists for emulating Atari
drives on a PC. Has anyone done anything similar for HP-IB?
There are 2 parts to this ... Firstly the interface, which is
HPIB/GPIB/IEEE488. And scondly the 'command set' -- what to actually send
to read/wrtie from the disk. As is well knwom the Commodore PET used
HPIB-interfaced drive units, but they won't work on an HP machine becuase
the command set is totally different (IIRC the Commodure units are
file-orientated, the HP ones are block orientated, for example).
Anyway, there were at least 3 command sets ued by HP -- Amigo (mostly
used on older flippy drives), SS/80 (more modern floppies and small hard
disks) and CS/80 (larger hard disks). I _think_ specifcations of all
exist, I have some of the mon paper, or a poke around on
http://www.hpmuseum.net/ may find something (for some odd reason this
information is often included as an appendix to the boardswapper guides!).
What I'd be interested in seeing (having got many old HP machines using
such drives) would be a microocnotroller board with an HPIB interface on
one side and IDE or SCSI on the other. Shouldn't be _too_ big a project,
but it's not something I feel like tackling jsut yet.
-tony