HP 9111A tablet

Hello, I saw your query on a web search for the 9111A. I worked in the HP factory where these were made and they were a high-quality piece of equipment! It's too bad that HP doesn't support it now. Some 9111A manuals had example programs for the 85A and other GPIB system setups. The 9111A was used with the HP300/9000 computers and EGS, which was quite a powerful CAD system in its day and you can find some of these systems still working. The HP EGS software was written in Pascal. The HP86B had a software program that would use the 9111A tablet for some drafting work. And it would plot out a tablet overlay, similar to EGS. It was called the "Series 80 9111A Tools, Graphic Tablet System, HP-86/87 Editor" and I still have a single-sided disk here that was usable on the old HP 9121 3.5" dual-floppy drive. I also have a disk of the 9111A HP85 System Tools, but I don't know if the disks are still good. I might have the HP85 tools on a cassette also. My HP86B died and so did my two HP85s. The HP86B might still work somewhat, but I haven't had time to fix it. The advantage of the HP86B and the HP87 were that they had larger screens than the HP85, so you could see a drawing on the screen better. The 8-bit systems were pretty slow, however, so it made any kind of CAD difficult. One other idea on this is that CEC (Capital Equipment Corp. in Massachusetts) made a GPIB interface for the PC called the IEEE-488 and in their promo literature it gave a GW Basic program for using the 9111A with a PC. They claimed to have used the tablet with an early version of AutoCad but they would not sell a driver and said it wasn't being marketed. It gave some code examples in Basic & Pascal. I've tried to find a PC mouse emulator for the 9111A tablet with no success, but a programmer might write one without too much trouble. The mouse protocol is published in some places. It would require a system with GPIB, or a GPIB to Serial bus converter like those made by IOtech. You can find converters on eBay occasionally. I've got a file of all this tablet stuff here somewhere and have wanted to do more with this since I own a 9111A and it sits here unused. I used an Appoint MousePen with TurboCad once and thought it worked better than an ordinary mouse device. It has a feel more like the tablet, but having used the 9111A with EGS, I thought it made CAD drafting easier. Some other types of tablets exist out there too and some CAD magazines have printed reviews. Using the 9111A depends on what you want to do. I'm seeing more of a need for a digitizer, but HP made some larger units for that task. The HP7470A and HP7475A plotters can also be used as digitizers with the Digitizing Scope. It was an optical view finder that looked like a plotter pen, only a bit larger in size. You could put a drawing in the plotter and move it around with the direction arrows and press the "enter" button to log a point when you had the Scope over the position wanted. The plotter manuals had HPBASIC example programs to do this. The X,Y data could be stored in arrays and printed out or stored on disk or tape. If you find out anything more on the HP9111, I would like to know what you find. Glenn Sherwood <gvsher(a)netzero.com> ================= cctech(a)classiccmp.org Vassilis Prevelakis cctech(a)classiccmp.org Tue Aug 5 22:52:50 2003 * Previous message: Backing up ST506 disks * Next message: 5.25 Disk Sleeves * Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] I bought an HP 9111A digitizing tablet on eBay for my HP-85 and I was wondering if anyone has the software needed to drive it. Alternatively, if anybody has info on the communications protocol used by the 9111A to talk to the HP-85 over the HP-IB bus, please let me know. Thanks