HP 300

From: Carlos Murillo <cmurillo_at_manizales.autonoma.edu.co>
Date: Fri May 18 11:09:51 2001

"Iggy Drougge" wrote:
-snip-
> they let me have it
> for 50 crowns. My pleasure.

You were lucky; I'm envious. I'd like to have more of these.

> Once I had bought it, though, I though that
> 9000/300 was a suspiciously low number. Wasn't that some kind of 68010 based
> machine? And why would such a machine have two Ethernet NICs?

It probably found a second life as a router. Good for the guy
who realized that the machine was still useful.

> It really semed
> like a waste, but on the underground ride how, I pulled out the big board with
> all the ports, which seemed notably shinier and newer than the NIC above, and
> found that it had a 68040. I thus deducted that it must be a 9000/380. Has
> this machine been upgraded, or did HP simply not bother to identify their
> machines any closer than the series (in this case 9000/300)?

That's indeed the case. All hp300 systems were pretty modular, although
there were some, such as the 340, that were more closed.

> In any case, it came without keyboard, and I read that in order to switch it
> over to serial terminal mode, one would have to perform a certain manoeuvre
> via the keyboard. Bloody well thought out, HP! Is there no way to use a serial
> terminal without any HIL keyboard involved?

I was forced to leave my 380's monitor behind (darn hp98754a weighed
about 100 pounds!) when I moved. I haven't yet gotten down to
setting up the 380 in its new home, and I will have to reconfigure
it to use a serial console. But I do have some HP-HIL keyboards.

> The machine starts up and beeps a little. It's got not drives installed, but
> there's a 50-pin "Centronics" connector marked SCSI/FS-HPIB. What is FS-HPIB?
> Doesn't sound like anything I'd like to feed into my SCSI devices.

The connectors in mine are marked (left to right, top to bottom)
1) BNC for LAN
2) AUI
3) parallel port (pc style)
4) HP-HIL
5) 9 pin PC style RS-232
6) SCSI/HS HP-IB (50 conductor Centronics)
7) 1/8" spkr
8) HP-IB

The board is a 98574-66510 Rev C and the ROM is labeled
1818-5062 2/22/91. The cpu is a 25MHz RC 68040.
Close to the SCSI header connector in the board there is
an unconnected 34 pin header. Maybe that's the HS-HPIB.
Indeed, HS-HPIB stands for a faster version of HPIB
that was intended for mass storage only; later 300 systems
such as the 370 had "human interface boards" (i.e., I/O
boards) with HS-HPIB in an attached cable, plus the
other usual ports and interconnects.

I use the SCSI and the standard HPIB connectors in mine
without problems and I am able to boot netBSD off an ST410800N
on the SCSI chain or HPUX 9.1 off three 330MB HPIB drives
contained in a 7963B behemoth of an enclosure; these
I plug in the standard HPIB connector. I have 64MB in
it. For a while, I used it as a pretty decent web
server. When I get it back up that's what I am going
to use it for.

I've put pictures of some of the stuff above at


http://jimulco.autonoma.edu.co/~carlos/hp/

No hp380 pics yet, though. Later.

carlos.

-- 
Carlos E. Murillo-Sanchez    email: carlos_murillo_at_ieee.org
Universidad Autonoma de Manizales, Manizales, Colombia
    and
428 Phillips Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA
Received on Fri May 18 2001 - 11:09:51 BST

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