HP Integral

From: Tony Duell <ard_at_p850ug1.demon.co.uk>
Date: Mon Jul 14 13:33:00 2003

Last week I purchased an HP Integral :-). For those who've not heard of
it, it's a mains-powered portable with a 68000 processor that runs HP-UX :-).

Of course I've taken it apart. There are 2 main PCBs, one each side of
a vertically-mounted chassis plate.

'Logic A' on the rear of the plate contains the CPU, 512K RAM (and
controller), the 'MMU' (a simple RAM mapping circuit), address decoders,
bus buffers, and the HP-HIL port (for the keyboard and optional mouse).

'Logic B' on the front of the plate contains the real time clock, floppy
controller, beeper (controller by an odd NatSemi sound chip, COP452 I
think - -I have the datasheet), HPIB interface and the Thinkjet printer
electronics (with a 1LB£ HPIL chip to link the Thinkjet CPU to the 68000
bus).

Also in the case is a Sony full-height 600rpm 3.5" floppy drive, a SMPSU,
the Thinkjet mechanics, a Sharp dot-matrix display and the expansion
backplane (2 slots, using DIN41612 connectors).

The system ROMs are in a plastic cartridge that plugs into the Logic A
PCB. There's a PCB in said cartridge containing 4 EPROMS (128K bytes
each) and a TTL glue chip. It's obvious a daughterboard containing
another 4 EPROMs could be fitted in the cartridge. The EPORMs I have
contain the HP-UX Kernel and PAM (a rather lusing shell). I am told
daughterboards containing HP Technical BASIC (which I have on floppy) and
some more unix commands existed.

The 2 expansion slots on my machine contain a 1M RAM card and an interface
for an external expansion chassis which I don't have. The latter has a 64
pin Blue Ribbon connector on it (I've never seen one this large!) which I
guess is just a buffered version of the normal expansion bus.

OK, a few questions.

I asusem that ROM daugtherboards are impossible to obtain, but has anyone
dumped the ROMS from one?

Any ideas if it's ever possible to find the GPIO and serial interface
cards for these machines?

Any software out there on the net for it? I have the normal HP disk set
(System disk, HP-UX commands (2 disks), Utilities, Diagnostics, Tutor,
and NP Technical BASIC).

Anything else I should know about it?

-tony
Received on Mon Jul 14 2003 - 13:33:00 BST