HP 80 Series Software

From: Tony Duell <ard_at_p850ug1.demon.co.uk>
Date: Sun Jun 1 17:12:00 2003

> >Can their tapes be read on HPIB based tape drives?
>
> No, The tapes were DC-100 type tapes and there's no HP-IB tape drive
> that handles that size tape except for the very rare HP 9877 External Tape

Actually, the 9877 is not an HPIB device. It's got a custom parallel
interface which links to the 9825 using a 98032 16 bit GPIO interface module.

Inside the 9877, there are 1 to 4 tape drives (identical to those in the
9825 itself), each with its own controller board, again very similar to
the 9825's internal tape controller. There's a little interface PCB which
handles things like drive selection and initialisation (and nothing
else!), and a PSU, again mostly copied from the 9825. The interface on
the 9877's tape controller card is pretty much the same as the 9825's
internal I/O bus.

The 9877 is a pretty dumb device. It transfers data 1 bit at a time over
the LSB of the parallel bus. OK, it does use the DMA feature of the
98032. But much of the intellegence must have been handled in software on
the 9825

> Memory but it's only designed to work with tapes from the HP 9825 and 9831,
> plus no one has one that's still operational. I know some of the bigger

Well, the hardware of mine still works, but like everyone else I'm
missing the prgoram tape for the 9825. The correct wiring and jumpers for
the 98032 would be useful too -- I know the pinout of the connector on
the 9877, so can make a pretty good guess as to the wiring of the cable,
but it would still be nice to know for sure.

-tony
Received on Sun Jun 01 2003 - 17:12:00 BST