Well William, you've come to the right place. My particular obsession is HP21xx machines, and I've got about 9 or 10 of them. While I do have a fair amount of DEC gear, TONS of heathkit, and some DG stuff on the way, the HP21xx line is my passion. I also have tons of 790x drives, 13037 controllers, racks, etc. etc. I know there are a chunk of HP 21xx collectors here, about half active and and about half lurking. If you run into any issues I'd be happy to help. On to your questions.... The holy grail *drool* There is plenty of software on the net, and among the listmembers here, for the 8's. What? The HP21xx wasn't your FIRST choice over the straight-8? I'm HURT! :) Correct... they ran BCS, DOS, MTS, RTE, TSB, RJE, all kinds of different stuff. But RTE is what they still run a lot in industry, mostly in test & mesurement, and in the military. This keeps the prices somewhat high for them. On the bright side, they aren't terribly rare. At least the 21MX's aren't. The 2100's are pretty hard to find, the 2114/2115/2116's seem to be extremely hard to find. Well, except... search Ebay for 2116B and you'll see a beauty for sale! Ok, Bob Shannon will vehemently disagree with me... but I think the 21MX's are extremely reliable (he'll agree there), but I think the 2100's are almost as reliable (he'll disagree here). The core memory section can be very troublesome to work on (to me at least) in the 2100. But at least with the 2100's, once you get one working, it generally runs forever. All the older HP stuff is built like a battleship, and pretty easy to work on. And very well engineered. The bus driver IC's (DTL if I remember right) are scarce... BUT... there are so many 21MX's still in production use, most cards are plentiful, as are thus dead cards with bus chips that can be snagged. Microcode and boot roms (blank) are not impossible to find, but a bit scarce. servo platters and heads for 790x drives. Air filters. Spare cpu set. A decent vintage prom burner to save off rom images. Spare power supply. If you want to run TSB, the 12920/12921 mux set is required, and rare. You are correct. The core "boards" go bad fairly frequently, pretty much never the core stack itself though. If it is a bit stuck on or bit stuck off, the repair is trivial. Why do I get the impression it's crisis that you've been talking to? :) Otherwise, the XYD and ID boards seem to be the more problematic. As I said, 2115 will be kinda hard to find... crisis may be your best bet, albeit for real $$$. And there's a gorgeous 2116 on ebay. 2100's are around, but getting scarce. 21mx's are everywhere. Try scrap dealers. I have lots of 21MX's available for trade, and lots of associated peripherals. ok Bob, you know you're itching to chime in here :) Jay West

HP 2113's can be found on eBay for $100 to $250, not that uncommonly. Many list members have machines of this class, I've got a rather large pile of these later-model semiconductor RAM machines, as well as a 'full set' of the original three core memory machines. Its a very easy machine to bootstrap with no peripherals, and a tiny programming language and O/S has been written to support these fine old machines. I think you made an excellent choice! William Maddox wrote:

Hi Bill, Where are you located? I'm in Orlando Florida. I have several HP 1000s (a couple of E series, one F series and one M series). Steve Robertson in Boca Raton also has a couple and Bob Shannon in Mass has at least one of everything. Bob and one of his buddies are working on writing their own Forth-like operating system called HP/IL-OS. There's a website for HP/IL-OS somewhere but I can't find the URL at the moment. Steve is working on writing low leve\el HP-IB routines to interface to disk drives, instruments and the rest of the HP world. Me, I just scrounge up more HP 1000s. I've found a 2115(?) with core memory and I'm working on a deal to get it. Jay West, our list administrator, also collects HP minis. I can't tell you how difficult they are to maintain. I've only had mine for a couple of years but I've never had any problems. I've collected LOTs of HP computers and calculators over the years and in geneneral they're MUCH bettter built than the usual grade of electronics and computers so I don't expect andy real problems. Here's a link to a URL showing where I store my HPs, <http://www.classiccmp.org/hp/warehouse/warehouse.htm>. I share this building with a couple of other guys that collect space stuff, test equipment, old cars etc so the place has lots of clutter but there are a couple of HP minis in there too. Joe At 05:25 PM 10/29/03 -0800, you wrote: