18 Nov
1997
18 Nov
'97
4:10 p.m.
James Willing <jimw(a)agora.rdrop.com> wrote:
While wandering around one of my favourite surplus
gear haunts today, I cam
across a couple of HP 1000 F series minicomputers. While they look neat, I
know just about nothing about them. Anyone out there familiar enough with
them to give me the 'infamous 25 words or less' speech on their significance?
They're real-time control systems, based around the 21MX processor
family (which succeeded the 2100 (ca. 1972) and 211[456] (ca. 1967))
and running one of several flavors of HP's RTE operating system.
I've never actually used them.
I worked on them for years.... You will still find them in Nuclear Power Plant control
rooms,
all phases of automotive testing and even handling online ATM transactions. The E series
was
even
used as a fast front end for Burroughs mainframes. Also lots of military applications.
The front panel/door drops down to show the memory backplane. The top three boards are
the
two channel DMA, Memory Protect and MEM (Memory Expansion Controller). This was needed if
you
wanted to use more than 32K of memory. The back backplane was for the I/O cards. Near the
bottom
is the TBG (Time Base Generator). The Model 2117F had more slots and the hardware
floating
point processor was a separate box. The more rare version had the Floating Point boards
built
into
the top of the regular case. This meant a loss of memory and I/O slots....
These systems had all kinds of I/O available from paper tape puches/readers to mag tapes
to all kinds of hard disk drives, floppies, terminals, A/D, other instrumentation, etc.
Later they had SCSI and various proprietary and standard networking.
Lots of great memories :-)