24 Sep
2006
24 Sep
'06
3:48 p.m.
Hi Tony
1) What softwware do people recomend? HP BASIC looks
reasonable,
actually, it does at least support named procedures with formal
parameters. Anything else reocmended?
HP BASIC is quick to put together and powerful. The documentation is good
and available (as you've seen, or got). I think the documentation was one of
HP's strong points with these machines.
HP Pascal gives you the speed, but you'll definitely need more memory ...
2) How much RAM do I reasonably need. If I pulled one
of the 256K cards
from the 9816 so I could add a DIO I/O card, would the machine still be
useful?
My programming career started with HP9816s' with only the 256K on-board RAM;
that was using Basic 2 originally, then Basic 3. And we got by - the
company didn't want to spend any more than it had too! That was in civil
engineering & construction where we were able to put together costing,
critical path planning, and some envelope & pre-stress design software.
Whilst it is certainly constraining, so you'll probably be ok with one
add-on RAM card for a lot of things. Later on, I got involved with a land
surveying package, which besides being able to do a multitude of cadastral
calculations, included a fairly comprehensive CAD facility. That definitely
needed more RAM, and was standardised with a 1MB add-on card. For all above
software, the only IO we did was RS232 for HPGL plotting, so only needed the
built-in port.
3) I've been reading the 9836 service manual [2].
I makes reference to
the 'Developer's Documentation' or some such, which apparently contains
information for people who want to design DIO cards and/or port OS's to
the machines. Does anyone have this (it's not on bitsavers or the
Australian museum that I can see). It certainly sounds like something I
should read if I can.
Haven't seen or heard of this.
4) Anything elase I need, or should keep an active
lookout for?
Probably 913x/915x spare hard drives, unless you're able to get the drives
at http://www.bering.com/main.htm
Regards,
Peter Walker
--HP9000/200 tinkerer, and still looking for Pascal 3.1!
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