New toy, HP Apollo 4500, and it's broken...

Sounds vaguely familiar, I remember two versions of the 2100s one had a black front panel w/red lights, the other one had a beige front panel. They were the CPU of HP2000 timesharing systems. They were pretty neat for their time (mid-70s) and I did my first "on-line" programming on them. The earlier ones boot off of paper tape, then the new technology... mylar oooh! I don't remember if they ever got weaned off tape booting though. Once you logged in you were at the command line and in a basic interpreter. They introduced me to instant gratification programming vs. waiting a day or so for the cards and the printout to come back or having to wire boards. Oh, yea... if it's one of the older ones, when the big oil filled capacitor goes in one of the disk drives the vented panel provides for spectacular visuals! If you don't want it, please let me know the details on it. -----Original Message----- From: museum(a)techniche.com [SMTP:museum@techniche.com] Sent: Saturday, June 13, 1998 3:36 PM To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers Subject: Re: New toy, HP Apollo 4500, and it's broken... This is somewhat tangential, but I suspect whoever is reading about HP Apollo's may be able to contribute. I came across a rack mount system in the local surplus store. The faceplate reads "HP 2100c Programmable Microcomputer System". Any ideas what this is? Worth picking up? Jon