What is an HP98616?

At 01:25 AM 7/24/05 +0100, you wrote: The "System Disk" should be but it will not include any language extensions so none of the peripherals or internal options (clock, error messages, DMA, etc) will work. It's a dammed minimal system and about the only thing that will work is the ALPHA display and the default disk drive. However once you get a system running you can load the .BIN files (device drivers) located on the "Drivers + Language Ext" disk using the LOAD BIN filename command. When you get all the drivers loaded that you want you can save the entire operating system as one file (if your drive is large enough. It won't fit on a floppy disk). Use the LIST BIN command to show what BIN files are currently loaded. You can also use SCRATCH BIN to unload all the BIN files but that's not particularly usefull since you won't be able to do much with just the minimum OS. >IIRC< the command to save the OS file that is currently in memory is SAVE SYSTEM filename.* The interesting thing is that you can create many different operating system files, each with different BIN files included and save each OS file using a different name. Then when you boot the system you can press the space bar and it will stop the system from automaticly booting the first OS file that it finds and instead it will display a list of all the OS files (and ROM cards with OSs) and you can boot any OS file by pressing the one or two letter code displayed next to the desired OS. See <http://www.classiccmp.org/hp/hp-boot.htm> for more information about this. *There are some oddities about naming the OS files but I don't recall all the details off the top of my head. One of the things that I found was that the LETTER displayed with the OS file depends on the one the first letter of the second half of the OS filename. If you name the OS file SYSTEM_BAS then the letter will be B but if you saved the exact same file as SYSTEM_RAS then the letter will be R. Also, if the Boot ROM will display the first B file with the code 1B. The next B file will be 2B, etc etc. So if you created a system and saved it as SYSTEM_BAS and then saved it again as SYSTEM_RAS and then rebooted and viewed the OS files you would see 1B and 1R. If you then saved another OS file as SYS_BAS and then rebooted and viewed the OS files you'd see 1B, 1R and 2B. IIRC you don't have to use the name SYSTEM although that's what the manual says to use. You can end up with some real screwy codes depending on what file names you use! For example you can save HPL, Pascal and BASIC OS files all using a Bxx suffix and all the files will be displayed as 1B, 2B, 3B etc even though they're different languages! However the system will always know that the files are OS files since you used the SAVE SYSTEM command to save them. I haved played with this in a long time but I can look up the details if you need them. or does it run under I believe they are. However BASIC 5.1 itself supported the Hirectical File System (HFS). In other words directories, sub-directories etc. I'm not sure of the specific meaning in this case but usually it just indicates the type disk that's included in the set (5 1/4" vs 3 1/2", etc). Joe