HP 21MX Ethernet/SCSI card?

[Warner Losh]

> On Feb 21, 2015, at 3:56 AM, Johannes Thelen <johannesthelen at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Mystery have solved!
> 
> I traced down receive & transmit pins from RJ45 and scoped little bit. I found one pin bursting 9600baud data couple seconds intervals and I connected this to terminal. Here's result at start up:
> https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_DR111cK6W-LTZqeWt2QzlRRU0/view?usp=sharing
> 
> *************************************************'
> SCSI INTERFACE FOR HP-1000.  GRUMMAN 1995.
>   Module: START; Version: 5.60
> Test Group 1: EPROM CHECKSUM TEST - PASSED
> Test Group 2: GLUE LOGIC TEST - Test #5 - PASSED
> Test Group 3: RAM ADDRESSING TEST - Test #5 - PASSED
> Test Group 4: SCSI CONTROLLER TEST - Test #8 - PASSED
> Test Group 5: RAM DATA RETENTION TEST - Test #2 - PASSED
> 
> Test Group 6: WINCHESTER (FIXED) DISK TEST
> 
> Device init routine - ** FAILED **
> 
> NCR register: 21 Expected data: 01 Actual data: 00
> 
> *************************************************************
> So Grumman made this board. Chip dates was right, very late design for this old computer. Pretty cool!

For years Grumman made it its business to buy up older computer lines that
had some small amount of life in them and support them for as long as it could
extract support contract payment out of the users. Without doing any development
work at all, with only very limited bug fixes (at least that’s my experience with
Solbourne). The timeframe is about right.

Warner

> ****************************************************
> 
>>> If you did find one of those then you could use the HPDrive software
>>> on a PC with a GPIB interface to emulate a CS/80 drive.
>>> http://www.hp9845.net/9845/projects/hpdrive/
>> 
>>> That is CS/80, not C580. You would need to find an 12821A HP-IB>>Interface to use that.>>http://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=486>>If you did find one of those then you could use the HPDrive software>>on a PC with a GPIB interface to emulate a CS/80 drive.>>http://www.hp9845.net/9845/projects/hpdrive/
> 
> Thanks for tips! I have lost couple hours those sites before. I probably make some own high speed downloader boot ROM / hardware / PC soft just for fun, but I have to test those too.
> 
> This is topic of its own, but do anyone know any 21MX assembler and microassembler for DOS/Windows? Or have I make one..? I have little (demoscene) project going on for this 21MX. Same project includes IBM 1800, hopefully... Later more this totally insane project, but I guarantee no old computer is harmed on that performance ;D
> 
> Thank you all!
> 
> 
> - Johannes ThelenFinland
> Before microcomputers blog (Finnish) http://ennenmikrotietokoneita.blogspot.fi/
> 
> 
> 
>> From: jdbryan at acm.org
>> To: cctech at classiccmp.org
>> Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2015 13:25:53 -0500
>> Subject: Re: HP 21MX Ethernet/SCSI card?
>> 
>> On Friday, February 20, 2015 at 9:09, Glen Slick wrote:
>> 
>>> If you did find one of those then you could use the HPDrive software
>>> on a PC with a GPIB interface to emulate a CS/80 drive.
>>> http://www.hp9845.net/9845/projects/hpdrive/
>> 
>> Johannes: you could also use HPDrive to emulate a 7970 9-track tape drive 
>> or 9144A cartridge tape drive, so you wouldn't need to write your own 
>> emulator.  Your CS/80 boot ROM should be able to read the first block of 
>> the 9144A tape image into memory, although the code read in must be 
>> arranged in a certain way.  Let me know if you want the details.
>> 
>>                                      -- Dave
>> 
>