Frank Knows his stuff was Re: What is this HP 9000/220?

From: Frank McConnell <fmc_at_reanimators.org>
Date: Fri Jan 2 16:33:32 1998

Joe <rigdonj_at_intellistar.net> wrote:
> Frank knows his HPs! I know the 200 series pretty well but he's got all
> of them down pat.

I've been doing stuff with HPs for over 20 years now (mostly with
3000s and HP PCs), and some of it stuck. But I've never worked with
Series 200s so don't know that much about them, just what I've picked
up here and there. And I still think I have a lot to learn.

Why do I know about Series 500s? In 1989 I took a job at a little
company called The Wollongong Group, supporting a product for the HP
3000 called WIN/TCP for MPE/V. Little did I know, they also had a
product for the HP 9000 Series 500s called, straightforwardly enough,
WIN/TCP for HP 9000 Series 500. They expected me to support that too
-- after all it's all HP stuff, it's all weird/how different can it
be? (yep, that's how they thought) -- so I did.

Somewhere along the way I decided I wanted a windowing environment
that could handle HP terminal emulation on my desk, and after fooling
around a bit with PCs I saw some guy up in Berkeley trying to be rid
of a 9000 Series 320. So I bought it, and it was good. That sat
there 'til early 1994 when I got retreaded into a Windows device
driver kind of guy. Now I guess it's part of my collection -- it sits
in the storage closet.

> FWIW the 9000 Vectra series computers (or some of them anyway) used
> 80286 CPUs and were MS-DOS compatable.

9000 Vectra? My recollection of the Vectra family is that it's all
IBM-compatibles (well, mostly, I remember the earliest Vectras and
they were about 99% if you allowed for the HP-isms that snuck in, like
the HP-HIL interface for the keyboard and mouse, the HP keyboard with
the f1-f8 keys across the top, and the funky HP Multimode MDA/CGA
display adapter) and never was a part of the 9000 family.

Though I think I remember something about a coprocessor card (set?) you
could stick in ISA slot(s) to run Rocky Mountain BASIC. Of course HP
would have sold that in/for Vectra boxes.

> NOW My turn. Does anyone know exactly what a 9000 217 model is? I found
> one but I've neverheard of it before and it's not in any of my catalogs.

Every once in a while I see a flavor of 9000/200 that is built into or
around an HP 2382 terminal housing: small, beige skin, brown bezel around
9" monochrome CRT. I think some of the ones I've seen were hooked up
to 91[23]x disk drives, and can't remember whether the processor was in
a similarly-sized box or in the terminal. Could that be it?

I think the HP Integral PC was also the HP 9000/207 though I don't know
if it was ever sold under that name.

-Frank McConnell "I want my MPE" (w/apologies to Dire Straits)
 <fmc_at_reanimators.org>
Received on Fri Jan 02 1998 - 16:33:32 GMT