27 Nov
2006
27 Nov
'06
4:32 p.m.
I was cleaning out the shed, and found this HP box I
brought home for no particular good reason. It says -
HP 9000 PC305, or very nearly. Is this along the line
of what you're talking about? Most of the guts are
Not really. That sounds like a somewhat interesting PC clone -- I assume
the expansion bus is ISA
The machines I like have an expansion bus which HP termed 'DIO'. It's a
100 pin double-sided connector, same connectors (but not pinout or
signals) as the S100 bus. One odd feature is that the edge connectors are
spaced at half the pitch of the height of the connecotr brackets on the
boards (that's the bracket that holds external device connectors). So you
can put a board with an external connecotr in every other slot, the
remaining slots being for things like RAM, DMA controller, etc.
I have several machins in that line. The 9816 is built into the case of a
9" mono monitor and has 2 expansion slots. In the bottom of the machine
is a PCB with a 68000, 256K RAM, serial and HPIB ports, etc. The 9836 is
a larger desktop machine with a separate monitor that fits on to. It has
8 slots and 2 built-in 5.25" floppy drives. And the 9817 (which is all
over my bench at the moment) is an HP shoebox sized thing with a 68010 on
the mainboard and 6 slots,. 2 of those are taken up by the text and
graphics video PCBs.
-tony