HP 2000 notes

Hi, Seen on another newsgroup, I thought this might be of interest to HP 2000 collectors ... particularly the note about "dozens of paper tapes" :) ------- Forwarded message follows ------- Date sent: Wed, 31 Oct 2001 11:11:28 -0500 Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] OT: HP2000? From: John Korb <johnkorb(a)LASER.NET> To: HP3000-L(a)RAVEN.UTC.EDU Send reply to: John Korb <johnkorb(a)LASER.NET> The HP 2000 is a very old machine, the last of which rolled off the assembly line in 1978. George Mason University (the State University in Northern Virginia) had (it is long gone) the next-to-last HP 2000 produced. It ran a version of the operating system with date code 1812. The operating system on this system was "HP 2000 ACCESS BASIC". The system GMU had (which was fairly typical of the HP 2000's of the day) consisted of the following hardware: -- one 21MX-E processor with 64K bytes RAM, used as the "System Processor" -- one 21MX-E processor with 64K bytes RAM, used as the "I/O Processor" -- one 7970E nine track 1600 CPI tape drive -- one 7920 disc drive with 50 MB capacity, of which the Access operating system could only address the first approximately 33 MB -- one 2617 line printer -- one 2392A card reader -- one 2640b terminal as the system console The operating system supported 32 users. As the "HP 2000 ACCESS BASIC" name implies, the system supported a single language, BASIC, but it was a good one, and the old BASIC/V on the HP 3000 appears to be an expansion of the HP 2000 ACCESS BASIC. There were interfaces RJE, and many HP 2000's supported users who created/edited batch jobs on the HP 2000 which were then submitted through the RJE interface to an IBM, CDC, Univac, or other mainframe (as GMU did). There was no print spooler or spooler for the card reader, so people wrote their own, in BASIC, some supporting GE Terminets or DECwriters as remote spooled printers. The accounting structure was based upon account names consisting of four characters - a letter followed by a three digit number. The "A000" account was the equivalent of the HP 3000's "PUB.SYS". It was the system library account, and had special privileges. It was here that you placed the "HELLO" program that every user ran when they logged in, whether they knew it or not. Group library accounts on the HP 2000 were those accounts where the three digits in the account name were "000". For example, all users in the accounts D301 through D399 would be allowed special access to programs/files in the D300 account. The Z999 account was used by HP for special purposes. It has been so long now that I don't remember what the unique capabilities of Z999 were. The HP 2000 also had the capability of running other operating systems in stand-alone, single-user mode. One of these was Fortran, but I never used it so I can't comment on it. In my basement I still have dozens of paper tapes of HP 2000 BASIC programs. In 1999 and 2000 I converted some of those to run on the Classic (16 bit) HP 3000 in BASIC/V. The most difficult part of converting HP 2000 BASIC programs to run on the HP 3000 is that the disc files on the HP 2000 were based on 512 byte "blocks", which means that any HP 2000 application "smart" enough to know the algorithm used to calculate how many free bytes there are remaining in a block (there are overhead bytes for each string, etc.) has to be painfully rewritten to run on the HP 3000. That's about all I have time for. I hope that gives you some feel for the HP 2000. There were many of us who loved that little system. As to whether there are any still running, I don't know, but I doubt it. John At 2001-10-31 10:21, David T Darnell wrote: [...] ------- End of forwarded message ------- Stan Sieler sieler(a)allegro.com www.allegro.com/sieler/wanted/index.html www.allegro.com/sieler