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EEVblog #904 - Hewlett Packard HP85 Professional Computer

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Fungus:

--- Quote from: Stray Electron on August 05, 2016, 10:34:33 pm ---   I still have stacks of HP-85s, 86s, 87s, 87Ms, 9820s, 9825s, 9835s and 9845s, ONE HP 9831 and even a pair HP 9877 Mass Memory (Quad tape) drives. I even have one prototype HP-85 :-)

--- End quote ---

Photos?

chris_leyson:
Still got a pair of 9825's stashed away somewhere, the 16-bit processor a 3 chip hybrid was used in a few HP instruments, HP3585 is the only one I can think of at the moment. As far as I know the architecture was based on one of the HP 21xx series mini computers, HP2104 or 2114 maybe ? The assembler mnemonics are the same. By the way if anyone has a hex dump for the HP9825 assembler cartridge I would greatly appreciate a copy.  :)

John Heath:
I remember the 9825. Many enjoyable days writing code on it.

Input " what is your name " a$
if a$ = " Dirac" print " get back to work"
else
print " nice to meet you"

It took months old Dirac to understand why the computer seemed to have a bias against him , ha.

The 9825 also had plugin ROM cards. One of interest had to do with a HP 3060 board test system. Part of HP's strategies for the board test market was faster software development  by having the computer itself write 90 percent of the code to test components on a PC board , guarding out grounds and stuff to better test resistors and condensers. The up shot is they needed a way to have the program write it's own code. In short if you list the program then run then list the program after the code would not necessarily be be the same as the program has the ability to rewrite itself.  It was was a odd and new concept for it's time that I have not seen repeated to date. It did require a special ROM card to be plugged in before a program could modify it's own code. We would leave it running around 5:00 after work. The next day at 9:00 AM 1000s of new lines of code would be written on a 8 inch floppy disk for the bed of nails PC board test software. This was HP's marketing advantage. The classic " hello world " takes on a whole new meaning if it comes from a program that wrote itself.

pelule:
I worked with  IBM an HP-85 in my beginning. no i am retired and a like to restart with the hp-85 again.also writing my own binary code extension, i found the hp82929A clone, but cannot find the system monitor rom :-//, needed to break an step execution. any or idea help is welcome. had experiance in binary coding on ibm and 4/bit assembler :-DD

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