On 24 Mar 2010 at 20:48, Tony Duell wrote:
[Of coruse it does't have a backlit display.
or a colour display, or
internal disk drives. You don't use it to watch movies. The memory is
row after row of 6264s, the battery islead-acid. No prizes for
guessing what it is]
HP-110? I seem to remember seeing a pack of Gates D-sized lead-acid
cells in the battery compartment of one.
Close enopugh :-). I do have an HP110, but I normally use one of the pair
of Portable+ machines that I also own. They all run off a 6V lead-acid
battery. The service manual shows a battery pack consiting of 3 Cyclon
cells, many of the machines actually contain a Panasonic block battery.
The former are easier to obtain and what I generally use for replacements.
The Portable+ has a few advantages over the 110. The first is a larger
display (full 24 lines) and a connector inside that carries enough of the
display lines to connect to an external composite video interface [1].
The second is that it takes 2 optional 'drawers', one at each side. In
both my machiens, one coatains more RAM (there's over 800K of RAm in
there -- over 100 6264 chips), The other contains ROM sockets and can be
used as a read-only disk. If you want a real disk drive you can link up
an 9114 floppy drive or (something which is not commonly known) an SS/80
or Amigo drive using an HP82169 interface module.
[1] Tjhis consists of an HP ASIC and 16K of SRAM. It's rare, but I
managed to find one, and the interface connector panel for the Portable+
All _I_ need in a laptop is a terminal emulator and a text editor. A
spreadsheet is useful. My Portable+ has all those in ROMs.
A couple of years back I needed to display wome output from an HP9830 on
a laege scrren. The set up was an HP11205 RS232 interface in the 9830,
linked to the Portable+ running a VT100 emulator, then the video
interface I mentioned linked to the composite input on a borrowed video
projector. Worked perfectly...
-tony