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1980s Vintage Computers |
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Hewlett-Packard Series 80 - LinksHere are some of the places on the web with useful or well put together info on the HP Series 80. The Hewlett-Packard Virtual Museum has some excellent pictures of the HP-85 and the HP-86. The best place to start learning about the HP series 80 is the Agilent overview, as this company used to be the part of HP that produced the series 80. Here are their pages that refer to series 80:
Note there are a couple of typos in the above overview. The Centronics printer interface is part number 82949A, and the HP-85 Advanced Programming ROM is singular (but the HP-87 equivalent is a two-ROM set). The HP Calculator Museum has a HP-85 / 87 page. They also have some HP manuals on CD. There are new articles added now and again, such as a description of LIF (List Interchange Format). There are a couple of very good HP-85/87 emulators available:
The Series 80.org page has some very useful downloads including HP-85 and 87 utilities, several user manuals, a brochure for the HP 9915, as well as some further ROM images. My thanks to vp for his help! The HP Computer Museum in Australia has a massive collection of on-line manuals and programs to download. Recently Jorge Amodio has reverse engineered the Programmable ROM module, and has produced a prototype. His future projects should be worth following! André Koppel has a lot of documents on the web at http://213.73.93.228/cms/fileadmin/Series_80/ including several rare manuals such as the HP-87 Assembler ROM manual, the HP-86B Service manual, and very unusually source code listings for the HP-87. The book Digital Retro by Gordon Laing summarises the design of 44 different computers including four pages on the HP-85. There is good HP-85 page on Wikipedia, and also one on the DC100 tape. The Hewlett-Packard Series 80 Configuration Guide is a ten-page leaflet issued in 1981 to show all the available options the owner could buy from HP. Victor Toth's calculator site has a long piece on his HP-85 including some useful repair tips (this site is a recommended read). Mike Davies has bought and sold many HP-85s, here are his buying tips. Eric Bal's page contains a complete listing of the HP Series 80 Basic commands. The HP-41 library contains scans of old copies of the 'HP Journal' and the 'Computer Journal of PPC'. I strongly recommend the July 1980 Journal as this is dedicated to the HP-85, only problem is that it's around 19MB to download. Similarly the December 1982 Journal has an article on the HP-86 & HP-87XM, plus a full description of the 82900A CP/M System module. The PPC journal includes many program listings, but there is no index. So far I have found further articles on the CP/M module, critical of the software for not supporting the serial module. Datareign Ltd. have a nice HP-85 page, explaining its role in engineering labs. Cluba Oldbits from Brazil has some excellent photographs of several computers, including the inside of an HP-85B. The following have some good photos of the HP 85:
and these have the HP 86:
A collection of old HP's photographed by Stan Sieler at VCF 4.0. A company in NZ called Precision Microcircuits currently use HP-85s for driving some of their test equipment. The HP-9915 (the industrial version of the HP-85) was also bundled as the HP 5181A with a 1332A display unit. This uses the 98155A keyboard, which is also used on the HP 8451A spectrography machine. The HP Series 80 machines did not come with built in floppy drives, and these are a very useful add-on. However there are different types of HP-IB drives made by HP, I would recommend the Amigo protocol drives such as my own HP 82901M (a dual 5¼" drive) or the single drive 82902M, both of which incidentally are very solidly built with metal cases. Section C13 of the HP Series 100 FAQ lists some 3½" Amigo drives, I now have a 9121D which works fine with the Series 80. The following is a list of some more HP drives, please see the Series 80 Parts List drives section regarding compatibility. The HPDrive project allows a Windows PC with an HP-IB card to emulate an Amigo disk drive, and also allow disk images to be transferred to Olivier De Smet's HP Series 80 emulator. There is an Easter Egg in the HP Extended Mass Storage ROM. There are several articles on the ClassicCmp cctalk, these are easily found with Google. Please join the Yahoo! group hpseries80. The hp-collection.org site has a full index of calculators and modules including HP-IL devices, but stops short of including the HP-85. If you are have the time, please try running Kermit for the HP-86/87 and let me know how you get on! |
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This page was last revised on: 21/03/08 |
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