Today I finally had a chance to check out a PC that I found a few weeks
ago. I had picked it up becuase it had an HP-IB connector on one of the
expansion cards. When I looked closer I saw that the card had a sticker
marked "HP 82324". Bingo! That's the part number of the souped-up
Measurement Coprocessor card that's commonly called a HyperViper! I have a
number of Viper cards with 68000 CPUs but I'd never even seen a HyperViper
card. The HyperViper uses a 16MHz 68030 CPU. The Vipers and HyperVipers are
HP 9000 series 200 or series 300 computers on a board. You install them in
a PC and run a driver and it switches over to the 680xx CPU and runs
(almost!) exactly like HP 9000 computer. It has a built-in HP-IB port and
supports additional HP-IB cards. It also mounts a HP 9000 file system in
one file on the PCs hard drive. It uses the PC's parallel and serial ports
and uses the PC's keybaord and monitor for user I/O. Anyway today I opened
it up and cleaned all the dirt and insects out and fired it up. It booted
to DOS then loaded the HP software then switched over to the HyperViper
card and booted HP BASIC version 6.2 (Rocky Mountain BASIC) without a
hitch. Wahoo! I'm in business now! It even has the last version (D.00.00)
of the HP divers.
HP's Viper and HyperViper site >>
<
http://ftp.agilent.com/pub/mpusup/pc/old/vp_over.html#m5>
Joe
Received on Wed Apr 21 2004 - 18:24:23 BST