29 Dec
2010
29 Dec
'10
10:55 a.m.
HP did everything it could to shoot itself in the foot. After promising
compatibility among the 100-Series machines, the floppy format produced
by the 9114 driven by the HP110 Portable or the Portable Plus was
different from the format produced by the HP150. There were clever
I will say more in a reply to a later message.
I don't doubt you are correct (I have tried to avoid MS-DOS machines
whether HP or not :-)), but I have never had any problems reading HP150
disks on a Portable+ or vice versa.
The Portable+ Technical Reference Manual (yes, there is one, and yse, it's
rarer than hen's teeth) contains no information on the physical disk
format at all. It does claim that an HP150B or C (that's one that supports
double sided drives) can read/write Portable+ disks. It also gives a
procedure for formatting a single-sided disk on the Portable+ which can
then beread/written on the HP150A (single-sided drives only).
The manual also says (and I have proved this to be correct) that you can
use HP150 SS/80 drives (hard ar floppy) on the Portable+ using an 82169
HPIL-HPIB translater, provided the latter has a late enough firmware
version (there's a serial number given in the manaula, after which the
82169 will work). You can also used Amigo drives (like the single-sided
floppies) if you load a device driver in config.sys on the Poerable+
(the driver is in the ROM).
-tony