20 Aug
1998
20 Aug
'98
12:15 p.m.
On Thu, 20 Aug 1998, Alex Knight wrote:
tape reader, digitizer, etc.). I was surprised when I
got my
9830A and it had aftermarket ROM and memory cards in it. The ROM
is a "Fast Basic" card and it and the memory were made by Infotek.
The 9830 has a bus architecture for it's main ROM and memory
cards, and it has an I/O bus on the rear. I don't know if HP
ever published the specs for these buses, perhaps Infotek reverse-
engineered the timing/functionality to make their cards. Also
Infotek did an amazing amount of stuff for the 9830. All of my Infotek
manuals are in storage, so my info is sketchy, but, yes, they reverse
engineered the 9830 and made everyting from peripherals to replacement CPU
cards! The CPU card was, I think, 2901-based and was advertised as being
much faster than the original HP design.
curious about the Infotek cards was that the markings
on all
the ICs on their cards had been intentionally rubbed off. I
wonder if that was to make it harder for others to clone their
design.
I think this was fairly standard practice for paranoid computer companies,
and I think the method used to defeat this copy protection scheme was to
XRAY the board!
At any rate, it predated the Apple II by about 5
years,
it has built-in BASIC and storage, and you could add stuff to
it. What more could you ask ;-)
Of course, you know that Woz worked at HP before doing the Apple thing.
The resemblance of the Apple ][ to the HP desktops (esp. the 9825) is
pretty striking.
-- Doug