HP 2000F'

Patrick wrote.... Actually, I do have the parts to build a few more of them - and have been offered rather enticing sums of money to do so from several people who are not on the list. That being said, I'm having trouble defying physics and creating enough time to persue doing so. I have my own machines I need to consolidate & restore first. I did say "running"... I'm not aware of any that actually are running. But it's not quite as hairsplitting as it sounds, because there's more to it than just having the correct hardware running... I am aware of a few machines in museums that are likely to be HP2000 TSB systems, but one can't tell if it was really an HP2000 configuration or was it just a system running RTE. I'm fairly sure some in museums are/were TSB machines, but even those don't run to my knowledge. It's kind of an odd thing. With a few very key exceptions, an HP2000 TSB system used off-the-shelf HP hardware that was also used for other more common OS's such as RTE. Are there 21MX cpus in museums? Sure. 7900A drives? Sure. 7905/7906/7920 drives? Sure. Do people have those machines/devices running and fully operable? Sure! But do those cpu's include the special additional firmware for HP's TSB? If not, then they are the right hardware but missing a key element. Do they have the 12920/12921 mux sets? If not, no TSB can run. And more importantly, some other OS can and likely DID run on them then. So if someone has an HP2100 cpu with a running 7900A drive and paper tape reader... is it an HP2000 machine? Not without the special microcode that was required just for TSB. And the OS wouldn't run without the MUX set. So my argument is that it's really not an HP2000 if it's completely incapable of running the OS due to missing chips. If NO other OS would run on it, then I could see an argument for saying it is still an HP2000. But without those extra bits, the machine almost certainly ran some OTHER os like DACE, DOS, RTE, MTOS, etc. And one certainly couldn't call it an HP2000 TSB machine then. Jay