Calcomp 1038: A0 plotter, single color. Using huge 24V-DC servo motors for x and y. Command language is PCI/906. This is interpreted by a 6800 microprocessor PCB (letter-size). Coordinates are than transfered to another letter-size PCB which contains a discrete sequencer (lots of 74xx-chips) and the anolog server ciruitry. I even have got the circuit diagrams for this beast... Best regards, Erik.

On Feb 13, 2007, at 1:34 PM, Glen Slick wrote: I have an HP 54111D digitizing oscilloscope, and I do exactly that with some frequency to my HP 7550A. Lately I've become enamored with talking to the scope via Agilent VEE, as that works pretty nicely, but it's slow as pissing tar when running on a "real" x86 box...it's even worse under an emulator. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

In article <m1HH3Kz-000J0gC at p850ug1>, ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) writes: Yes, and there is a fairly decent timeline of HP plotter products there, but for other vendors? Good luck. Even the WikiPedia entry for Calcomp is surprisingly weak. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

I have an HP 7550, an 8-pen carousel type that can take up to A3 paper. Also got a much older drum-type plotter that's missing the pen-holder, and a low-cost BMC plotter that has four felt pens in a sort of turret head. -- John Honniball coredump at gifford.co.uk

I'm probably mis-remembering the numbers, but isn't the 98135 the HPIB interface for the 9815 calculator? I thought hte plotter had HPIB as standard. Nice! The old HP desktop calculators are not that easy to find (at least over here), and the interfaces/peripherals are consdierably rarer (makes sense, people bought/used the calculator on its own, but nobody bought the peipherals withput the calculator to drive them from). I don;t know how much you know about the 9815 internals, but anyway. It's a 6800-based design -- apart from the firmware ROMs, all the chips are stnadard :-). Therer are 2 itnerface slots on the back (well, that is technically an option, but as you have the interfaces, I assume your calculator has it fitted). Each slot can be logically divided into 2 sections. One is an input-only version of the 6800 bus (essentially common to both slots), the other is a 12 bit output port + control lines (separate for each slot). The interface modules cotnain firmware ROMs contining the driver software (in contrast to the 98x0 and other 98x5 machines, where the ROMs were seprate modules). Some of those ROMs have 'interesting' instructions, the BCD interface, for example, has an instruction to access the numaric storage registers at the byte level (letting you create non-normalised numbers, etc). I asusme you've found http://www.hpmuseum.net/ . There's a lot of info on the 9815 and interfaces there. I've come across that processor in the HP7245 thermal printer/plotter. For those who've not come across that machine, it's a plotter, but not a pen plotter. Basically, there's a thermal printhead with 13 elements. 12 of them aranged i na diagonal pattern, are used for printing dot matrix text -- the diagonal arangement is so that it can print acrros the paper or up and down the papepr equally easily. The 13th dot is used to draw lines like a pen plotter -- there's a complex motor control board to drive the 2 motors (hard movement and paper movement) jsut like in a pen plotter. It responds to 2 HPIB addresses. One of them is for printing, you send it ASCII characters and control condes. The other is for plotting, you send it HPGL commands. Yes, I have one, I undersand the electronics (even the 2-stage switching PSU), apart from the details of the processor.... I believe the same processor is used in the 9871 Daisywheel printer [1]. This is often claimed to be a Selectric mechanism, AFAIK it isn't (it's a daisywheel, pure and simple [2], but it does take Selectric ribbons, probably because they were easy to get at the time. [1] There's one listed on E-bay at the moment. Alas I can't afford the shipping to England.. ]2] Well, maybe 'simple' isn't the word for a machine with a toothed belt that follows a contorted path round sprockets on the chassis and carriage, and which is drivein by 2 motors such that one of them moves the carraigne, the other (also fixed oteh chassis and not the carriage) turns the daisywheel. I've not found out anyhting about it, nor any info on the eariler 80bit nanocontroler (1820-1691 or something similar) used in the 98x5 interface modules, the 9885 8" floppy drive, etc. -tony

Well, the 9815 wasn't used with HPIB disk drives, and I am not sure if you could simply print to an HPIB printer (you could certainly send characters to one with the 98135, but you may not have been able to, say, list your program to such a printer). But it certainly could work with HPIB lab instruments. It appears that HP designed their desktop calculators as instrument controllers -- BCD interfaces (capable of taking the BCD data sent ot the display drivers in many older digital instruments) exist for the 98x0, 9815 and, IIRC, 98x5 machines. I am almost sure it does. If you can put up with my handwriting, you can download my RE'ed schematics from http://www,hpmuseum.net/ . They're on the documantation page for the 9815. No, you've nis-interpretted the ROM size. There are 2 versions of the HP9815 processor board. The original one uses 2112 RAMs (256*4), and 2Kbyte ROM chips. It's laid out for 8 such chips, only 7 are fitted (so 14K of ROM). This board can take a RAM expansion board that mounts on the track side (top) of the PCB at the rear edge. The later version of the CPU board uses 2114 RAMs (and has a total of 4K RAM that can't be further expanded). THis board has 2 8K byte ROM chips, but only 6K of the second ROM is normally accessible (so the sake size -- 14K -- of ROM). You can solder a link on the CPU board (it's shown on the schematic) to enable that last 2K. I don't know if it does anything useful, but it is structured as a peripheal ROM, the system will find it, and it does have sensible command names. I've had my 9815 totally apart, of course. If you're tempted to do the same, can I recmend against dismantling the keyboard. For one thing the PCB is held down by around 100 timy screws. And when you get the PCB off, the keycpas fall out and are a right pain to get back. Don't ask.... Suffice it to day I had to send a panic e-mail to a couple of lists asking for the order of keycaps in part of the keyboard... -tony

It certainly is a 6800... The other 40 pin chip, BTW, is a 6821 (or maybe a 6820, a PIA anyhow). The 16 port lines of that PIA are used as a 12 bit output-only data bus and 4 select lines. The latter are decoded by the '154 on the keyboard/display PCB and select things like the tape control circuit, printer, display, keyboard, output ports (for the peripheral slots) and so on. Input from the peripherlas (internal and external) is via an 8 bit input data bus (which also carries the data from ROMs in the I/O modules) to a cvouple of /257 muxes on the CPU board. The memoery map is a little odd in that the 6821 is mapped as the first 4 locaionss, then RAM (and obviously ROM at the top of the memory space, to get the reset vector, etc). Address line A15 from the CPU is not used, the memory space is effectively 32K bytes. There is some logic in the fact that the PIA is at the bottom of the memory map (rather than in the spcace ebtween ROM and RAM) in that said PIA can then be accessed using the page 0 addressing instrucitons, which are shorter and faster than ones specifying the full 16 bit addess. The PIA is, of course, used a lot in the I/O routines. All the ones I've seen (and the 'chicklet' style 9825 keyboard [1]) have had all screws, fortunately. [1] My 9825 has the full-travel keyboard, but my 9831 (electrically the same machine, but with BASIC, not HPL, in ROM) has the chicklet keyboard. Err, it's a 9815. It has those conenctor blocks sandwiched between the PCBs, so you can't conenct things together (easily) without almost fully assembling the machine. Something I'd rather no have to keep on doing... I learnt my lesson. I now make a diagram of the key locations before removing any screws -tony

On 2/15/07, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote: prn printers? do you mean porn printers? boy where was I?! :D