The late, great TRS-80

Well, I don't think HP had any shops, and it's not the sort of thing that would haev been sold in, say, electronics shops. But you could certainly order one from HP, and it would be shopped to you. RIght. Let me tell you the 'installation' procedure for a 9830. Open the packing box. Remove the machine, manual, and mains lead (power cord to you?). Place the machine on your desk. Check the voltage selector switches are set correctly for your mains (knowing HP, they'll be set right for the country it was sold in, but it doesn't hurt to check ;-). Plug the mains lead into the back of the machine. Plug the other end of the mains lead into the wall. Turn on the swtich at the front of the keyboard. A few seconds later, you get a prompt. It's normally called a 'lazy T', and looks like |-, but it's one chracter. At that point, you can either type in a calculation, using normal infix notation, and hit 'Execute', at which point the machine evaluates it and displayes the answere, or you can type in lines of BASIC, pressing STORE after each one. Or put a tape in the internal tape drive and LOAD a program from that. There is nothing to configurem nothing to put together. It worked right out of the box. About the only thing you didn't get as standard was a printer, but you could buy an HP9866 printer which was designed to sit on top of the machine. The interface for that was built-in, you just plugged a cable (supplied with the printer IIRC) between the 2 units. There was even a mains output socket on the 9830 so you didn't have to run a separate mains lead back to the wall. The BASIC was somewhat cut-down, there were no string variables, for example. But you could get add-on ROM modules to add string variables, low-level I/O (essential if you wanted to link it to other devices), matrix operations, etc. There were 3 internal ROM expansion slots, and 5 'external' ones under a flap on the left side. About the only piece of bad design is that the internal and external ROM modules are not mechanically or electrically compatible, although the ROM chips themselves are the same and contain the same code. If you wanted to link it to other devices, HP sold various interfacs for it. There were 4 slots for those on the back, but I think there was an optional expansion unit too. Among the interfaces was the 11202 8 bit parallel, used for linking up paper tape punches and readers, etc, the 11203 BCD interface to take readings from digital instruments, the 11205 half-dulex serial interface for serial printers, etc, the 11206 bit-banged modem interface (also RS232), the 11284 datacoms interface (a nice hardware-intensive asynbc and sync interface), 11336 printer interface,. There was also an HPIB interface, but I can't rememebr the model number of that. So you _could_ expand the machine, but you didn't have to. It worked as soon as you plugged it in, it had a keyboard, display (1 line, 32 characters) and storage (digital tape drive) as standard. -tony