Internal HP docs on 9845 sys?

[Pete Lancashire]

* Just out of curiosity, what a big company like HP does with its
"historical" documents?

Easily. >99% of the destroy all documentation, specially when it was
internal. Your best bet, and mine has been for documents people took home
with them, and luckily not thrown out during a move, or the widow or
surviving kids not tossing it all out.
Sometimes it is because they perceive it as propriety (hide mistakes), or
has no value. This happed at Tektronix, for one instrument line they 'saved
money' by getting rid of the filing cabinets.

Here's what I do. Find out where the <fill in the blank> was designed. Put
ads on Craigslist, local papers etc. I've even run ads on a couple local
radio stations.  Look for local clubs, associations etc. One of the
buildings I worked at when at Burroughs in the 70's still holds gathering
once a month.

Any retirement groups ? Physical or on-line. Some have newsletters. Has
worked pretty well for me.

West coast ? put an ad in a Phoenix/Palm Springs paper. East coast ?
Florida.

-pete



On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 1:56 AM, F.Ulivi <fulivi at tiscali.it> wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> I've been working for the last few months on implementing the MAME
> emulator of HP 9845B system.
> In case you're interested, have a look at MAME development page at
> https://github.com/mamedev/mame.
> My emulator mostly works, the main missing thing now is the graphic
> mode and the ability to load optional ROMs.
> Anyway, I'm posting here because I'd like to ask you a few questions on
> HP docs.
> The last thing I worked on for this emulator is the "TACO" tape driver.
> I reverse engineered it
> entirely from sw & the (scarce) docs available enough that it works.
> So here a few questions for you:
> * Back in the days, what was the HP approach to document
> internally-developped chips for its own
>   sw developers? I mean, was there a kind of programmers' guide for TACO
> chip? Is there any hope
>   someone scanned it and made it available somewhere? I know that for
> hybrid processors HP made
>   an internal manual titled something like "how they do dat" manual...
> * Just out of curiosity, what a big company like HP does with its
> "historical" documents? Do they
>   have an archive where they keep documents & sw from, say, the 70s? Or
> do they throw everything away
>   when there is some kind of company "shake-up" such as big layoff
> phases, closing of a site, merging
>   and splitting of divisions?
>
> Thank you.
>
> -- F.Ulivi
>
>