26 Jun
2007
26 Jun
'07
12:16 p.m.
I'll grant
that it was expensive (I would guess about $6K). But it
certainly wasn;t limited and could do a lot more than a 1K ZX81.
Depends what you mean by "do more". In the context of a personal
computer, talking late 70s/early 80s, it's users writing their own
programs in BASIC, pretty much. The ZX81 had strings, floating point
maths, and while no full screen editor, it could at least show 32x25 or something characters, so you could edit text, play
chess, or if you
believe the ads, run a nuclear power station, as I recall. ;=AC)
If you really wanted to do that sort of thing, you could link a larger
display to the 9830. I doubt you could use it for editing the BASIC
program, but you could certainly use it for displaying said program's output.
But is data logging or whatever what a /personal
computer/ does? The
AActually, I think a lot of the early 'pesonal' computers (meaning
machines that didn't need an air-conditioned room and a computer
department to run them) _were_ bought by scientists/engineers to process
their results. Taking said resulta automatically and controlling the
experiment was a naturual extension of this.
HP couldn't even display a graph, and if you need
to take the price up
Actually, you'd get a better resoution by printing caracters on the
'optional' 9866 pritner than you get out of a ZX81...
into 5 figures to draw one on paper, I'm not sure
that's a "personal
computer" any more. I wouldn't like to try to edit a program of even
4K on a 1 line display. Hell, I didn't even buy a Psion Organizer
The reason I put 'optional' in quotes above is that just about everybody
also bought the printer. I've never heard of a 9830 being seriously used
without it, the interface was built-in and even a couple of the built-in
commands _require_ a printer. At which point you print out the listing
and use that for editing.
until it had at least a 4 line display, and that was
ludicrously
cramped.
I think this is the really big diffeernce. One thing that's very clear
I have no idea what the minimum amount of memory
was, possibly 4K bytes.
AFAIK the maximum on a standard HP machines was 16K. Oh yess, and unlik=
e
Sinclair's RAM, it didn't wobble :-)
:=ACD Fair point! (But there was always Blutak!) from other HP products of the time (and earlier) is
that they were
solid, they did what they claimed (and more), and they did it
reliably.
You could trust an HP9830 not to crash when it was controlling the
nuclear power station :-)
Same thing with pltting graphs. Rather than have a low-resolution
block-graphics display, you added a plotter or an HP1350 and got enough
resolution to produce a _useable_ graph -- not just a pretty picture. Of
course it wasn't cheap, but...
-tony