- #Active boot disk version 22 software
- #Active boot disk version 22 Pc
- #Active boot disk version 22 professional
- #Active boot disk version 22 series
#Active boot disk version 22 series
The 98×6 series was the only one that had these, which is a shame, because it was awesome. I never saw a 9000/520 system, but they could cost $30-60,000 depending on configuration, and HP didn’t sell too many because ITAR restrictions meant they were only allowed to sell them into a few other countries.Īnd as someone else noted, the scroll wheel on these things was an absolute joy to use in editing programs. We had a “computer party” when I was, uh, 12 I guess, and brought home about six HP workstations with game software, and Dad noted that the sum of their value was more than double the value of the house. (Control of play by hitting keys, the ship player getting stuff on the right hand side of the keyboard and the chopper pilot on the left side.) That’s not a game design style that’s popular, and it was interesting to play. There was one - I think this was for the 16/26/36 family - where one player was running a ship, and the other was running a helicopter, and the ship had an artillery-like gun on it to shoot down opposing aircraft, while the helicopter landed and took off from the ship and bombed enemy submarines, so the two players were cooperative with quite different tasks. They were also being written by hobby people who had little or no previous experience, so their games were not a lot like current ones. HP had fairly different ways of accessing graphics on different generations of workstations, some using mostly bitmapped graphics for speed, others only allowing plot type statements, so it was hard to port from one generation to another. I played a lot of homebrew games on the 9816, this computer’s less advanced sibling, and there were a bunch for the 9835/9845 series as well. There was a big (at least in HP circles) underground game scene for their workstations. Posted in classic hacks, Repair Hacks, Retrocomputing Tagged gpib, HP, HP9836C, workstation Post navigation
It’s a neat twist of irony then, that the MAME video game emulator works perfectly fine emulating some of those ancient HP workstations. Games were anyway not high on developers’ priority lists, since this was a computer aimed at serious users who wouldn’t spend $25,000 on a machine just for fun. This worked fine for at least some of the disk images found at the HP Computer Museum, allowing him to run a few more graphics demos, including a rather crude version of Pac-Man.
#Active boot disk version 22 Pc
One way to solve this issue is to use the HP’s GPIB bus to connect it to a reasonably modern PC with a GPIB interface card, then run a program called HPDRIVE that emulates a GPIB hard drive to the old workstation. And even what little is available is difficult to transfer to the machine, since HP used several floppy formats over the years that are largely incompatible with each other, making disk images useless unless you happen to have the exact same type of floppy drive that they were made on.
#Active boot disk version 22 software
Getting the computer to run anything else turned out to be a bit of a headache however: since this was not a mass-market machine, very little software has survived into today’s online archives. got the machine with a few disks containing some basic utilities as well as some graphics demos, which were certainly impressive for their age. Similarly, the two 5.25″ floppy drives were standard Tandon TM100-2As which had some experience in repairing, although these specific units merely needed a thorough cleaning to remove forty years’ worth of dust.Īfter a thorough scrub of all the internal boards, the machine duly booted from its accompanying BASIC boot disk. The display cable turned out to be dodgy, but since it was just a straight-through sub-D cable it was easily replaced.
The machine came in more-or-less working condition. got his hands on one of those machines, an HP Series 200 9863C from 1981, and managed to get it up and running.
#Active boot disk version 22 professional
While a home computer enthusiast in 1981 might fork out a few hundred dollars for an 8-bit machine with 64 KB of memory, a professional could already buy a 32-bit workstation with 2.8 megabytes of RAM for the price of a brand-new sports car. But there always remained a market for professional users, who bought equipment that was so far ahead of consumer gear it seemed to belong in a different decade. The microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s turned computers from expensive machines aimed at professionals into consumer products found in the average household.
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