4 Nov
2014
4 Nov
'14
9:33 p.m.
On 11/03/2014 02:55 PM, Brent Hilpert wrote:
The BASIC being mentioned and linked above however, is
a single-user interpreter, not a multi-user or time-shared system ..doesn't sound like
the sys you are looking for.
No disk support then?
8" floppies on a 2114 sounds very unusual,
I've never heard of
support for floppies for the 2116/15/14 procs - floppies came after
the prime market life of those procs. Don't know if a later I/O
floppy interface would have been backwards compatible to the early
procs.
Our admin Dick Stover was quite a guy. He enhanced the BASIC in a lot of
ways. I remember discussing having him add true integer variables, but
he didn't end up doing that one. I do think he added directly the
support for the other terminals and perhaps the call interface for
grading. I wish I had a tape dump of his sources, but I suspect they
have all be destroyed.
This felt very different from the traditional HP TSB experience. I
suspect he had no access to that code.
Does the single user card based version support storage devices at all?
The drives on this system were inside the rack in a locked cabinet. I
recall him opening them, removing the floppies and cleaning the drives.
We were not allowed to mess with them.
No idea what drive they used or what interface. This was around
1978-1981 so there would have been a number of choices including HP-IB.
It may have been 5 1/4 inch drives for all I can recall. I have no
pictures of the original system, but old friends from school also recall
this internal removable drive storage and the "CHAIN" support in BASIC
that allowed switching to another BASIC app off disk while keeping
variables in memory.