HP 2000 Time Shared BASIC Memories

Jay West (in a wonderfully informative message about HP systems) wrote: So, does anyone out there know of, or have, any of the HP 2000 Timeshared BASIC systems *running*? This is what I learned on also. The county educational services district purchased an original HP 2000B TSB system. Over the years, it was upgraded to a C, then C', then E, F, and finally ACCESS. The last I know of the system being in service was in the early 1980's. I've tried to track down what happened to it, but every lead has resulted in a dead end. I was able to visit the 'computer center' where the machine was kept (more on this in the story below). It was a little hole-in-the-wall building about 5 miles from my house. I think that it was running in the 2000C configuration when I saw it. It used dual CPU's (don't remember which ones). According to the operator, one CPU handled the I/O stuff (the system had, as I recall, 32 ports, most connected to Bell 103 modems), and the other 'ran' the BASIC environment. The system had a washing-machine sized disk drive with removable multi-platter disk packs. There was also a rack/cabinet about the same size as the rack that the two CPU's were in that contained a fast drum memory that was used for swapping store. Does anyone know if HP still can make available the TSB code? It would be TOTALLY amazing to get ahold of it, write and emulator for the CPU and associated hardware on something like a PII 450 running Linux, and *run* TSB again. It would be a big project, but chances of finding the real mccoy seem pretty unlikely nowadays. Here's a recollection for y'all on the 2000C Timeshared BASIC system. One day I was reading the TSB manual (wish I still had it, but I think it ended up coming un-bound because I used it so much, and I think it got tossed away years ago when I was moving) in an effort to learn any new tidbits of information. On the page for the "NAM" command, which was used to attach a name to the current program in working storage, I noted that it said to NEVER name a program with a single comma; i.e. NAM-, I wondered why this would be. So, I wandered into the terminal room at our high school, and dialed up the machine (I still remember the phone number!) and logged in. I typed in a little program, and typed NAM-, and pressed RETURN. A linefeed popped back at me. I thought..."well, that was exciting". So, I typed LIS and there was my little program as expected. I then did a CATLIST to dump out my user directory. The CATLIST came back empty. This was startling, as I *thought* I had a whole bunch of stuff in my directory. I then typed the command that would tell you how much (I think it was TIME) connect time you'd used this session, and how much of your monthly time quota you had left. The command came back with really weird answers...and, it came back with different numbers each time I ran the command. This was VERY strange. So, I logged off, and re-logged back in, and didn't type NAM-, and did a CATLIST. There was all my stuff. I typed in NAM-, then did a CATLIST... and all my stuff was gone. I then thought...I wonder if the NAM-, magically transports you to a different file area. So, I typed up a little program, gave it a name with the NAM- command (which seemed to take, and not affect 'where' I was), and SAVed it. I did a CATLIST. There it was. The interesting thing was that the CATLIST (which I hadn't really noticed before) said that I had some tremendous amount of storage blocks remaining. Upon noticing this, I thought I'd try CREating a big file, just to see how much space I really had available to me. I issued a command to create a 1000 block file..which was a pretty good-sized file, as I remember. I typed in the command, and pressed RETURN. There were three other TTY's in our computer lab, and all were occupied by other students at the time. When I pushed RETURN, all the other TTY's quit printing for a second or two...just like the machine had crashed (which happened from time to time), but as soon as my terminal printed it's acknowledging linefeed, they started right back up where they left off. Hmmmm... So, how about a 10000 block file? Well, that took the system a while to create...and everyone else was 'dead' during that time...no character echo, output 'froze' at the point where I pressed RETURN on my terminal. I did a CATLIST...and sure enough, there was my little program, my 1000 block file, and my 10000 block file. I did a KILL on my 10000 block file, and that took a bit, and everyone else again froze during the KILL operation. Too weird. I left it alone for then, and called a friend that night that went to another school that used the same system, and told him to make sure that he was logged on at 11AM the next morning, and observe. At 11AM the next morning, I was logged in, and had done the magic NAM-,. I asked the system to create a 100000 block file, pressing the RETURN on the command at 11AM sharp...which *appeared* to make the system crash, at least from my end. All the other terminals were 'dead'. About 2 minutes into my create, my terminal (a good old TTY ASR33), along with everyone else's chattered a few garbage characters, like these beasts did when the carrier dropped. Either the system totally crashed, or the operator had killed it to reboot. I was a little scared at that point, as I figured it was all caused by me. I didn't do any more tinkering after the system came back up that day. My friend called me that evening, and said "Did you do that?". So, I knew that whatever I was doing, it was system-wide! He wanted to know how I did it, but I didn't tell. I did a few more experiments with this strangeness, but never 'crashed' it again, just playing around to see how much resource this 'warped' place that NAM-, too me to could consume. In this space, I had a larger working storage set, had virtually unlimited file storage space (I wrote a little program that would CREate lots and lots of small files), and unlimited connect time. It seemed that NAM-, sent you off to the 'system overhead' area...where all resources that weren't in use were available to whomever had executed the NAM-, command. After tinkering with it for a while, I decided I should tell my instructor about it. The instructor and I were very close, and I figured this was something that could cause problems if the word got out about it. He was amazed..and immediately called the operator of the system, and arranged a meeting so we could tell them what was going on. We arranged a meeting in an evening after 'prime time' so I could demonstrate this. The operator was stunned...it would be terrible if the word about this got out...people could 'wedge' the machine pretty much at will. Apparently, a call was made to HP the next morning, and there were HP folks there the next day, and within a couple of days, the NAM-, command would result in something like "ILLEGAL FORMAT". According to our system operator, from what was told to her by the HP engineers, was that the the NAM-, command was a purposely written-in 'back door' that was put into the TSB code. It had to have been known about by HP, because of the mention of not using a name of ',' in the manual. In any case, the back door was closed, at least on our system. I made a point of checking, when we upgraded to the C', E, F, and ACCESS systems to check the NAM-, to see if it worked. It never did again. Sorry for the long message, but I thought it'd be of some interest to those who used these wonderful old systems. Best wishes, Rick Bensene