The standard DIO backplanes on HP9000/200 machines have twice ans many connectors as spaces for connector panels. The idea is that the 'hidden slots' canbe used for options that don't need connectors -- RAM, ROM (BASIC, HPL, etc), bubble memory, DMA, floating point, and so on. Some of the 9000/200 video cards are 2 PCBs, one with a bracket (with the video output socket), the other which fits in the hidden slot immediately above it. I wonder if that's what you have. Many of the internal-only options wouldn't be applicale to a 9000/300 machine, but the bubble memory card should work, for example. Serial portd are always useful. I've made up my own cables for these ports (the same connector/pinout is used on the uilt-in RS232 port of the HP9816 and HP9817). If you need it, I can dig out the wirelist. That's no excuse. Ecerything needs to be taken apart :-) There's the HP46020 keyboard. It looks much the same, and has the same size/layout of keycaps, but it's different internally. It uses mechanical keyswticehs soldered to a PCB, the circuitry is a mask-programmed COP400 microcontroller, the HP-HIL slave chip and a couple of 4000-series logic chips. The feel is somewhat different to the 46021, I think the older one is preferable. There are other HP-HIL keyboards with, IIRC, fewer keys. The Integral has one that stores on the front of the machine. AFAIK it'll work with other HP-HIL machines (it does, however, send back a different ID byte) -- the 46020/1 keyboards work on the Integral. This one has much the same mechanical design (and size/feel) as the 46020. There's also a rare version of one of the compact keyboards used with the 9816, but with an HP-HIL interface not the custom one for the 9816. I have never seen this one, though. If oyu are desperate, yuo could try using the electronics of the 46020 with another matrix of switches with a feel/spacing that you like. Alas the encoder and switches of that keyboard are all on one PCB, so you'd either have to desolder the HP-HIL chip and microcontroller and wire them up with the rest of the circuitry on a new PCB, or you'd have to cut the original board to separate the switch area from the electronics. I've never found any data on the HP-HIL slave chip. It seems to have an SPI-like interface to the COP, but I have no idea what the regiters, etc, are. -tony

Ohly if you go for colour-hungry chrome-filled bloatware like "desktop environments". X is not a window system; X is a framework for building window systems. Run just a twm and a few xterms and you can do fine with colour resources as simple as even just 1bpp monochrome. However, it has been my experience that it takes fairly carefully written clients to deal well with unusual environments, and 6bpp colour is unusual. (When I ported X to the NexT 2bpp greyscale hardware, I discovered some stuff didn't like 4-entry StaticGray....) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B