HP 150 stiffies

From: Frank McConnell <fmc_at_reanimators.org>
Date: Sun May 10 00:12:13 1998

Doug Yowza <yowza_at_yowza.com> wrote:
> I've been finding parts of HP 150's for a few months now, and I finally
> collected enough of them today for a complete system (including a new
> in-the-box integral printer), but I'm short on stiffies. Anybody know a
> source of stiffies? I have the 9121 drive, which I think is single-sided.

They aren't special, any decent double-sided 720KB stiffies should be
usable. At least that is what I used to do.

Well, that is, unless you have one of the real early 9121s that doesn't
open the door on the stiffy. That's why some of the older HP stiffies
have "pinch" stamped in the corner -- for those drives, you're supposed
to slide the door over to the left 'til it catches, then pinch where
indicated to close it.

I think the real contemporary stiffies for those early drives didn't
have the spring to pull the door closed. But I've never actually seen
one -- they didn't last very long, in fact by the time we got a loaner
demo 150 at that PPOE (early-mid 1983) the diskette stiffy doors were
fully automatic.

> The HP 150's touchscreen is pretty cool. Is there a driver for it that
> emulates a mouse? IIRC, this Mac-like box predates the Mac, doesn't it?

Yes it does predate the Mac.

Driver to emulate a mouse? I never heard of one. Applications that
wanted to use the touchscreen were mostly expected to pretend they
were talking to a terminal and read the escape sequences that get
generated by the touchscreen (preferable).

Fairly late in my HP150 experience (1985-1986 or so), I got hold of a
couple of freeware TSRs that you could load to implement chunks of the
PC ROM BIOS interface on the 150. I don't recall exactly what they
did (video and datacomm, I think) but I did manage to get WordPerfect
4.1 to run on the 150 with their help.

And I found copies of them on a 150 stiffy last month! Not the
original distribution, but I think all the files are there. Time to
figure out how to get 'em up on the net for y'all.

-Frank McConnell
Received on Sun May 10 1998 - 00:12:13 BST