EEVblog Electronics Community Forum

Products => Computers => Vintage Computing => Topic started by: rsjsouza on April 14, 2021, 07:48:28 pm

Title: Do you have US$2,500.00 to spare? HP9830A
Post by: rsjsouza on April 14, 2021, 07:48:28 pm

No relation to the seller, but this showed up in the local sales website.

If the photograph is true, it looks quite well maintained.
https://dallas.craigslist.org/dal/sys/d/keller-historic-antique-1st-desk-top/7297667141.html

I would love to have it, but unfortunately I still didn't win the lottery (nor a Keysight giveaway prize)

Title: Re: Do you have US$2,500.00 to spare? HP9830A
Post by: rfclown on April 15, 2021, 02:38:09 am

There's a bunch of post recently dredging up old "computer" memories. This one made me Google to find the first thing I ever programmed on, which was, I think, an HP calculator similar to the attached picture. My high school in Illinois had it in 1977. It had a pen plotter attached, and you could write programs to draw pictures. You saved programs on magnetic cards. I still remember the commands to move the pen up and down: FORMAT 1 UP and FORMAT 1 DOWN. 44 years ago, but I think that's correct.

Title: Re: Do you have US$2,500.00 to spare? HP9830A
Post by: CatalinaWOW on April 15, 2021, 03:12:09 am

I used these when they were new, and while I have fond memories of the times I have no interest in owning one today.  The successor models with a full CRT graphics occasionally make my spending finger twitch, but I usually wake up pretty quickly when I compare the capability of that system with the fairly vanilla laptop I am typing this on.

The only thing the laptop doesn't do is generate the cool whirring sound of the tape as it searched back and forth for the record block it needed and then settled down to getting the data.  And I am sure that if I really wanted that I could find an mp3 somewhere.