HP 150 II (fwd)

From: Tony Duell <ard_at_odin.phy.bris.ac.uk>
Date: Wed Sep 24 12:07:30 1997

On Wed, 24 Sep 1997, Mr. Self Destruct wrote:


I'm replying both to the list and personally. Hopefully some of this
information is useful to both destinations.

>
>
> Anybody that can help her out?
>
> (What's a HP150 anyway?)

At last. A system that I own...

The HP150-II is the second version of HP's touchscreen PC, and is a rather
interesting system. It differs from the HP150 in the following ways :

1) Touchscreen is an user-installable option
2) Touchscreen, keyboard and optional mouse connect using HP-HIL (HP Human
Interface Link), not custom interfaces
3) There are 4 expansion slots (for special HP cards), not 2
4) It will take an 8087 coprocessor card
5) There is no buit-in printer. This was an option on the plain HP150
6) The video system has been redesigned. The motherboard logic has been
crammed into some ASICs and now fits all on one board.

It's an 8088 PC that runs MS-DOS from HP disk drives (things like the
HP9122 dual 3.5" floppy, HP9133 floppy/hard disk, etc) that plug in using
GPIB. There's also a nice terminal emulator in ROM, which emulates one of
the standard HP terminals (I forget which one).

Although it runs MS-DOS (and Windows 1.0, I think), it is _NOT_ an IBM
compatible. Some software was ported to it, and stuff which just uses the
standard MS-DOS (and BIOS?) calls should work anyway. Such applications
are not common these days, alas.

I have a shelf-full of manuals for it. There's a 2-volume user guide
(which I find a bit lusing...), a Terminal user guide, a Programmer's
manual (which mainly docouments the AGIOS (Alpha/graphics I/O system)
characters), and a Techref. The latter is a plain HP150 Techref with a
suplement that documents the differences. It includes schematics of the
mainboard, 8087 card, and RAM expansion card, I think.

I doubt very much if a techref will be a lot of use to you, though...

>
> She is not a subscriber to this list so if you can help, please e-mail her
> directly.
>
> Thanks!
> LeS
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Tue, 23 Sep 1997 16:57:51 -0700
> From: Brigid Cumming <bcumming_at_island.net>
> To: more_at_camlaw.Rutgers.EDU
> Subject: HP 150 II
>
> My husband brought home a touchscreen Hewlett Packard 150 II. He has its
> original manuals & it fires up fine. Could you help me find more
> information on and applications for this computer?

If there's anything you want me to look up, let me know.

I'm not sure where to find applications for it. What are you looking for?
Some plain MS-DOS stuff (_very_ old stuff...) will run fine, but anything
modern will fail due either to the fact that it's an 8088 (and not even a
286), or the fact that things like the serial ports are totally different
to IBM ones.


>
> Thanks,
> Brigid Cumming
> bcumming_at_island.net
>
>

-tony
Received on Wed Sep 24 1997 - 12:07:30 BST