20 Jun
2013
20 Jun
'13
12:50 p.m.
On Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 08:56:54PM +0100, Tony Duell wrote:
These old HPs were in general very solidly made and have interesting
designs. I certianly like them.
What more can I tell you? Well that depends on
what your are interested
in. I could bore you to death by talking aobtu the fetch-execute cycle of
the 9800 procesosr, for example.
Not much realy :) I thank you for the introduction. It's an impressive
and interesting line of machines.
I suppose I could ask if there is any relation, in spirit or otherwise,
to the HP85 computer that I own.
Firstly, I ahve to say that the HP80 series is probably my least
favourite deskop from HP. Farr too mach custom silicon for my taste :-).
That said, I hae a couple of 85s, a couple of 86Bs, an 87 and an 87XM .
Oh and a 9915. So perhaps I do like them after all... There are manuals
for them on http://www.hpmuseum.net/ if you are lacking aything.
In terms of their relationship to earlier machiens, there is very little
in common in the hardware (the only machine closely related to the HP85
series is the HP75 handheld computer [1]). But spriritually, yes... It
appears that one major use that HP envisaged for their machines was as
data loggers/control machines. It makes sense, HP sold measuring
instruemnts. One of the first interfaces for the hP9800 series was the
11203 BCD interrace which could read in 10 (I think) digits of BCD from
the display drivers of a sigital instruemnrt and present them to the
computer as if they'd bneen typed o nthe keyboard. And of course therwas
an HPIB itnerface for the hP9830.
[1] THe somments in the ROM listings for that machine are hilarious...
And the HP85 carried o nthis tradition. Ther wrre BCD and HPIB itneraces
for it too. I beleive some large HP instruemtns (gas chromatographs, etc)
came with an HP85 as the cotnroller.
-tony