HP 2000 system requirements (was Re: Request for Armed Guard highway escort (HP2100))

From: Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com>
Date: Tue Feb 4 18:23:00 2003

I wrote:
>> I strongly disagree. 2000C, 2000C', and 2000F are *much* better than
>> 2000E.

Jay wrote:
> I did say "I believe", ie subjective opinion. I'm familiar with C, E,
> and Access from personal experience using them in high school. In my own
> experience, C was "twitchy". E was rock solid. E gives up features like
> "Print Using" and "execute" I seem to recall, and E didn't support group
> libraries and such... but E was perfectly usable and stable as heck. Of
> course, YMMV

Never used E. The workspace on E was too small for many of my programs,
and I depended on PRINT USING quite a lot.

But I used C' for about two years, and it seemed extremely robust to
me. The only problem we had was when the fixed-head disk eventually
died, and even though the system was under an HP maintenance contract,
they couldn't repair it. So they upgraded the C' to F, and gave us more
moving-head disk drives. I used F for about a year, and it seemed
really solid as well. Not surprising, since F is basically C' modified
to use the HP-2100/21MX optional microcoded floating point instruction,
and to not require fixed-head media.

> One backed up 2000E quite handily using disc-up and copy loader commands.
> That I know for sure, and I THINK you could do a sleep/hib to disk?

No, sleep/hib only works to tape. Same with selective dump/restore.

You can copy files (including programs) disk-to-disk, but it's not very
convenient, and it doesn't preserve the user ID table. If you take down
the system, you can back up an entire disk onto another of the same
geometry, but you can't do that during timesharing.

> I was just saying that the E version is perfectly usable,

I suppose, as long as your expectations are sufficiently low. Even
most of the games wouldn't fit on E. That's why I've had very little
interest in it, and mostly have wanted to run C', F, or Access.

And it would be fun to set up Access for RJE to an IBM operating system
running on Hercules. :-)

Eric
Received on Tue Feb 04 2003 - 18:23:00 GMT