What is an HP98616?

Tony, You are correct on all counts. I wrote that a long time ago and it was based on what little I could figure out at the time without any documentation so it's not exactly correct. (You can't believe how long it took just to sort those few details out!) I also knowingly left out some details to keep it simple and understandable. For one thing, you do not have to press the space bar to halt the boot process. You can press any key and it will abort the process. BUT if you press a key such as B and it happens to corrospond to one of the boot codes then it will boot that system. Rather than explain the incatricies I just tell people to press the space bar since it should never be assigned as a boot code. Regarding the serial number, IIRC it is stored in an EEPROM in the later machines but in the early ones it is in the BootROM. At least that's what I seem to recall. I've never hacked the hardware on these machines so I'm just going on what I've heard or read. At 07:37 PM 7/24/05 +0100, you wrote: You're welcome. Good luck getting the OS up and running. I've had a lot of people ask me for copies of the OS so they could get their machines running but I couldn't help them since as I mentioned, a built and useable OS system is all in one file and it's too big to copy to a floppy disk so the only way to distribute it would be to find another hard drive and install the OS there and ship the entire HD to them. Not too practicle. However if you have the individual files (as you do) then you can copy them to a number of floppy disks and simply mail those to potential users. I've only recently gotten a set of installation disks myself so I haven't gotten to play with distributing the stuff yet. I guess you don't have the manuals for this. AFIK I have the full set of manuals for BASIC 5.1 along with a bunch of other useful related HP manuals such as the HP 9826/9836 and HP 9000/300 Series Computer Installation manuals, various peripheral configuration manuals, BASIC 2.1 and 3.0 manuals, HPL manual, Pascal manuals, Self-Study Guide to Instrument Interfacing using HP Basic, FSD Customer Engineering Manual and more. This stuff needs to be made available to the everyone. Al has asked about borrowing the stuff and scanning it and I've told him that he can but we haven't done anythng to make it happen yet. But it's about time that we did. How about it Al? Do you have time to do this stuff yet? If not, is anyone else interested in working on it? BUT I do have to warn you, I went through HELL to get these books and I DO want them back!!!! DON'T MAKE ME HAVE TO COME GET THEM! YOU WON'T LIKE IT! PS I just counted and found 24 manuals and that does not include the BASIC 2.1, BASIC 3.0 and Pascal manuals so I'm guessing that the total will be something like 36 manuals. PSS I also have some useful HP-UX manuals that need to be scanned and posted. Joe