A fellow has contacted me about the HP 2116 / 2000 Timesharing BASIC.
Apparently he used to work on the software and has some source code listings of
the dual-processor 2000 TSB software.
I know a couple of people here have, or are interested in, getting a 2000
system going (Jay..).
Perhaps the source listing should make it's way to Al, if such a listing is not
already archived.
Regardless, he would be interested in communicating with others working on 2000
TSB. If anyone is interested I will forward addresses.
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I had noticed on this web site:
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~hilpert/e/HP21xx/HP2116CSys/index.html#requests
that you were interested in software to run. I noticed some of the
memory dumps with BASIC keywords on the page.
I'm not sure if I can be all that much help, but I did happen to work
on those machines back around 1973-1975 and I have a complete source
code listing for the 2116 part of the 2000F timesharing system (which
I extensively modified, back then.) I do not know where (I did get
copies at one point) the source code listings for the I/O processor (I
think it was a 2114) are at, though. Might be in some box, might be
thrown away. (The I/O could be rewritten, if necessary. It wouldn't
need to support the lineprinter, which it used to support, and a lot
of it was wrapped around handling 32 separate user buffers. So even
if it is lost to me, it's possible to tinker things without facing a
horrible job to do it.)
I'm located in Portland Oregon, not far away.
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By the way, I'm pretty familiar with the internals of it and the 2116
assembly language itself, as I modified the system to include
timeshared assembly services and added many commands to the system.
It would be very interesting to me to participate in some useful way
in getting such a system operational. Not merely out of nostalgia, by
the way. HP 2000F BASIC was actually an impressive software design on
almost every level. It included some of the very best practices in
the numerical approaches used for the transcendentals; practices which
are rarely bettered even today. It included matrix operations that
were impressive in design. It's performance in terms of users was
also impressive -- especially so when one considers the limitations in
memory and processor speed and features -- a level that is also very
rarely achieved today, even with processors much, much more capable.
Much of the kind of combined skill sets that were applied so well in
developing a system like this remain rare and rarely understood.
Having an operational system would provide a hands-on experience to
show others what can be done so well and with so little, and perhaps
provide benchmark that others trying their own hands on modern
processors may find instructive.
I've often wished that I could find a working system to buy and bring
up, too.
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