1981 CAD Monster - HP Series 200 9836C
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- Опубликовано: 29 сен 2024
- The HP 9836 computer is incredible, expensive, uncommon, and unknown. I am so excited to have this one and thrilled to get it up and running!
Floppy drive refurbishing: • Floppy Drive Refurbing
HP Series 200 5.25" BASIC 4.0 Disk Images: archive.org/de...
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My uncle was an architectural engineer and he had an HP9836 CAD workstation + HP 7440 plotter printer that he used well into the 1990s. I recall HP techs working on it during one visit and watching them replace caps to keep it working. My uncle abandoned it only when Softdesk was purchased by Autodesk which then summarily dropped all support for the "ancient" CAD software my uncle used.
@mipmipmipmipmip Any onsite support is priced accordingly.
Another thing ruined by autodesk!
Back when hp innovated. Very cool man.
Yep I've worked with tons of those types of engineers. Typically avoid them.
Your uncle must have been a rich man.
My dad was an architectural engineer and owned his own business. He is first computer in the 1960s was the Olivetti Programma 101 but he switched to HP when the HP85 was available in 1980. A few years later he bough an HP9836C. And what a beast it was. The Graphic capabilities where unseen at that time.
I worked in Aerospace in the late 70s, early 80s and the HP Controllers were used for automated testing of control systems using the HPIB. I worked with the predecessor, the HP 9835 and later the 9826. I don't remember using a 9836, but I know I've seen one. I remember seeing one in an "old parts" storage area and I would love to get my hands on it.
We used to refer to it as the 98 - 36 not the 9-8-3-6. It was the ultimate gaming machine, we used to write archive game clones on the system in HP Basic.
I spent a year on a project programming the HP 9836 in the early 1980s for statistical process control - we wore out the left corner keyboard finishing because that is where we placed our left hand while spinning the cursor wheel. We also had a 10megabyte hard drive that cost $$$$
Ah memories of my HP9816 running HPBASIC which was a wonder.
It was in my hospital laboratory, using a flow measuring system via HP ADC and the interfacing was with that HPIB (IEE488,GPIB). The 3.5 inch dual drive was connected by HPIB, as was the 2-pen plotter and an enormous daisywheel printer that hammered out graphs using a bi-directional paper feed.
This was bought so I could replace the HP9825A which ran a system written in HPL a terse but powerful language.
I printed out the original HPL programs and wrote the equivalent in the BASIC - with some simple windowing ideas, as the basic had the ability to read a rectangle of the screen buffer into an array. The HP9825A had a 342 character LED!
Dude, this machine brings me back. The school I went to in the early '90s had one of these for the CAD class. It was used as a network Master machine that the Amiga 2000s were networked into. I miss working on those machines.
Outstanding video. My only complaint is that it ended too soon. I could have watched several hours of this without moving. Loved the use of the interface card in the Celeron for this.
Could make it into a mini series. I'm def interested in more updates on this one.
My dad worked for HP starting in the mid 70’s as a technician and retired as a regional sales manager. He would bring home all sorts of stuff that I got my hands on. I remember seeing the demos for this 9836C. And I will neither confirm nor deny that one of these demos consisted of a beautiful and very detailed black and white rendering of a nude model which revealed much with the use of the scroll wheel. A different time… 😊
Used one with HP-BASIC in ROM for testing AMD video chips. I had so many HP Word Generators with Analyzers, Scopes (on RGB), Power Supplies, Pulse Generators, and a Thermstream for temperature hooked up I had 3 GPIB cards plugged in to get enough address for all the instruments. Did all the setup and hold test to verify the timing diagrams and logic over a high/low/nor matrix temp and power. Did a lot of debugging the design too expensive to do on the big tester. The program was 4 reams of paper in BASIC ran from a hard drive on the GPIB interface that did not include the Verilog vector files. Sent the data to IBM PC through the serial ports just to get floppies that other pc could read to use Lotus. I lost track of how many boxes of floppies we used 20 maybe for 30 parts. There was a 3rd party IBM compatible drive for 2 or 3 thousand never got one.
I still have ENORMOUS RESPECT for old tech and old computers. We should remember the $180,000 hard drive I saw a pic of was GOD in its day!
Wow this computer is amazing for its time. Even today its still better then my work laptop haha.
I think the Skoal Bandit racing team in nascar back in the early 1980s used one of these, along with a bunch of sensors in the car, to get real time readings of the car’s telemetry.
I have a lot of late 70s - late 80s HP test equipment, I swear half the cost was in screws alone.
*The RF sections were #2 PosiDriv hell. Every Tech had a battery-powered screwdriver. Cheers!*
a very nice system .. and shelby had bo pay sooooooo much for it now, compared to the 80s :P
Really nice computer, way ahead of its time...
I used one of these at Motorola in the mid-80s for controlling HP test equipment.
HP Drive almost seems like something that should be turned into an open source project.
Yay! I feel kinda smart... Not knowing anything about the HP ecosystem, my immediate thought when you were talking about the incompatibility of the disk images was "Well, can't you emulate the drive or otherwise stream the data to the machine from something that _can_ read the images? 🤔"
That's kind of sad though... Obscenely expensive vintage CAD workstation, and no one's preserved any of the CAD software for it. 😢
The programs usually required a dongle and most programs had monthly or yearly license costs.
And enforced their requirement on the customer to not let employees take machines with software home.
The other thing is that few machines had the software and so far less probability today that someone would be able to scrounge a 9836 with working CADDS.
I'm unsure if anyone from Bentley has versions from the 80s/90s left of Microstation for example.
@@TheStefanskoglund1 Ah, the good ol' license dongle...
*Sticking my neck out here but I surmise that
Don't forget to unlock your hard drive by rotating the tulley toggle.
If they remake an HP 250 with modern hardware I'll take it, it's super cool.
I still like the CRT.
How many of these actually sold? Yes, I'm aware this is an amazing machine for it's time. But we're talking about something only major companies can afford, and then assign to their various employees.
Price of this HP today is:
The inflation rate from 1981 to 2021 was approximately 3.32. Now, let's calculate the equivalent amount:
Today's value = Initial value * Inflation rate
Today's value = $11,950 * 3.32 ≈ $39,634
i need to get in touch with you. iam from the year 3535 and i need that computer to go back to the future to fix our timeline then. thank you
I have an HP9826 and no boot disk, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE can you help? I can't even find an image for the 5.25" boot disk anywhere.
2 megs in 1981 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯
PC Master Race since 1980
It's something how getting color on your computer used to be impossible, then a big cost consideration, then it became commonplace, and now we just strap rainbow lights onto computers for fun.
Now we have hand held super computers that can fit in our pocket and we use them to record dumb dances and upload it to china
Color on computers has been around a long time. I think color terminals at least goes back to the 70s.
The main issue with color, I think, is the ram requirements. If you want 16 colors available per pixel, that's 4 bits per pixel. So that's a lot of ram in a 640x480. This was why so much early 80s color (like CGA) is per character and not pixel. It greatly cuts down on the ram requirements. 80x25 is only 2000 character cells while 640x480 is over 300,000 pixels.
That escalated! 😂
@@NerdyMeathead😅
@@tarstarkusz indeed, I recall most of my 90s graphics cards could either either be configured for 1024*768 OR 64k colours, but not both, at least not without clipping some extra memory chips in!
Hi. Great video resurrecting this historic computer. I wrote the RMB graphics drivers in pascal. It was my first software project at HP. Before that I was responsible for qualifying the Tandon floppy drives. You wouldn’t believe what they sent us. The color map was a rather last minute addition to the product specs. It did make it more fun considering how slow the graphics drawing speed was. Much of the graphics primitives were in assembly so it went as fast as it possibly could.
I'm all ears. What did they send you?
Ik neukte me soms suf 🥱
Als u de transistor, en microelectronica, ontdekte vind ik u ‘een baas’, nu gewoon een dikkke kop…
Exactly what I would expect from a Tier 1 manufacturer back in the day: everything is custom, nonstandard and eye-wateringly expensive! Having said that, I absolutely love the blocky design aesthetic. My Bachelor's degree dissertation project was to read HPGL design files (on a MicroVax II) and display them on a Tektronix graphics display terminal which also had a separate text display plane over the rendered images. The images took minutes to generate as even with compiled Pascal (the host machine was a 5MHz 32-bit lump - seriously expensive at the time!) the program had to squirt the terminal's ASCII control commands down a 9600 baud serial line. Not only that but the program had to parse the HPGL twice - firstly to work out the size of the final design so it could calculate a scale to fit into the terminal's 1024x1024 graphics capability and then to send the commands to the terminal doing the floating point scaling as it went. Kids these days could do the same thing 100 times faster on their mobile phones! 😂
Yes, it's a great machine. But still very standard compared to older computers from HP and others. This one uses a standard µ-processor, standard memory ICs, standard TTL logic, multiplexers, bus drivers, and so on. Only the mechanics of it is fully custom, basically.
@Herr Bönk Exactly. By taking standard commodity parts and building them into systems that used nonstandard protocols (like the HPIB and floppy format) they could gouge the customers into paying way over the odds. They (and other Tier 1 manufacturers) had got used to this pricing model when they produced unique hardware and tried to keep it going when they started using off-the-shelf components. Unfortunately for these manufacturers IBM messed it up by producing a machine that was too easy to copy and the rest is history! They tried to put the genie back in the bottle with the MCA architecture machines but obviously nobody was going to buy back into an expensive lock-in system when they could have cheap PC clones.
@@spacedock873 Indeed. But to me, it was all much more fun and exciting before IBM PC clones took over everything in the mid 80s. Seeing all these creative and exciting new models in stores, at firms, schools and companies. And not just because I was younger :)
@Herr Bönk Oh, I quite agree. Computing was much more exciting in the 80's with all the fast paced innovation, that is why I did a Computing Science degree in that era. Home computing is now reduced to how many FPS can be achieved in games and supercomputing is reduced to how many x86 cores can be squeezed in a 19 inch rack cabinet - everything traces back to the end of innovation caused by the IBM PC 😔
Everyone had their own "standards" back then.
Sure it's nice, but...... will it run DOOM!
Oh boy, blast from the past! I was in one of HP's IC departments back in the day (Hi fellow LID IC -ites!) and we used the 9836 series for IC CAD. Some fun facts:
1) The 256KB memory board was nick-named "Quarter Pounder" Of course, the 1MB memory board was the "Pounder"
2) The 9845B (predecessor to the 9836A/C) was used by Colin Cantwell for the Death Star walk through in Star Wars.
3) Later, Cantwell used the 9836C to create "A day in Loveland, CO" which walked through a full summer day. A view of the mountains started out with the sunny morning, went to an afternoon thunderstorm (lightning included!) then on to evening. Absolutely stunning, all done with palette manipulation. If you can find this, get it archived!!!
4) We (actually, Tom Baker) used the UCSD Pascal system (later Modcal - Pascal with module extensions) to write an IC CAD layout system, nicknamed Piglet (HP Integrated Graphics Local Editing Terminal). Piglet was eventually rewritten in C and released as a PC Board layout system. That should be out there somewhere. When I left HP in 1995, C Piglet was still being used for IC layout. By then it had migrated to HPUX workstations.
5) There was a internal game of Centipede written for the 9836C. I doubt it is available anywhere, but I brought a 9836C home to play it. It gave my wife nightmares after she played it!
6) By the time the 9800 series 200 was done, they were using the Motorola MC68040. I seem to recall those being in the later revs of the 9836C, but I'm probably wrong about that.
All in all, lots of fond memories of the 9836C and its descendants.
Forgot to add: SRM (Shared Resource Manager) was the network for HP workstations before Ethernet showed up. It was a hub-and-spoke system, so a server was required. One of my college roommates worked on that (Hi Carl!).
I'd be very curious what the "atmosphere" of the Ft Collins facilities are like today. I was former DEC in the Springs. Man did things change fast around there. It is my understanding that campus is now closed which is crazy because that was a large campus. I left shortly after Hurd. I saw the righting on the wall. Engineering no longer had authority. I pointed out the last two CEO's golden parachutes NEVER received the scrutiny that my R&D budget did. Just one of those exit packages could have advanced a few of our projects significantly.
I was going to jokingly ask what kind of games were available for the system, but... apparently there actually is one.
Don't you love Carly Fiorina?
You'd think HP wouldn't chose the worst woman possible for the job, but they did. She's so arrogant she can't learn from any of her mistakes.
@@fuzzywzhe And Ann Livermore was *right there*! Idiots!
I love how the computer essentially has nearly 500 times more memory than a VIC20, which would have been also available. Blows one's mind.
Well, at almost 100 times the cost, and only 2-3 times the processing power, it sorely needed something to justify it's price.
Considering you can put up to 1.5TB in the 2019 Mac Pro (at an exorbitant price of course), stuff like that is still achievable
@@jbritain And you can put up to 2TB in the Thinkstation P620, though that would cost you something like €65,000 just for the RAM.
@@katrinabryceTry $5k USD, or about 4.6k euro used. With inflation it's actually hilariously cheaper to get 2tb of ddr4 now than it was to equip this HP 9000 with 8mb of RAM back then, and you'd probably never find a use for even 1/4th that 2tb outside of large-scale compute tasks.
@@KiraSlith A 256GB stick costs a *lot* more than 4 x 64GB sticks, and to get 2TB, you need 8 x 256GB sticks.
Right now I have 4 x 64GB sticks in mine, and I will likely add another 4 at some point.
For the instrument geeks out there. HPIB became GPIB when it became a wider standard.
It makes me wonder what it would do if you plugged in a set of PET floppies to it.
*You have a fine memory. Essentially Bill and Dave told IEEE it's the h/p way or the highway. Given that at the time h/p dominated the aerospace electronic instrumentation and their computing space, was a no-brainer. Cheers!*
@@stonent *Probably nothing but spin and click, spin and click. h/p used a proprietary format interleave on 8", 5-1/4 and 3-1/2" floppies. Cheers!*
It already was a standard at this time--IEEE 488. Since HP invented it, they kept calling it “HPIB”, while everybody else said “GPIB”.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 *Correct. Forgot about that.*
From the days when HP made products designed by engineers FOR engineers. Function and maintenance was everything, cost was a secondary issue.
Plus the added benefit of keeping your room nice and toasty warm in the winter.😜
I have a 1960 HP counter with north of 75 tubes in it (524C) that keeps things nice and toasty when turned on.
@@mybachhertzbaud3074I have 2 gaming PC's on 24 hours a day and they heat up the room during the winter no mattet how cold it is.
If i need extra heat, i can just start AI video scaling on one of the PC's. lol
......processing comments in my personal A.I.....(Antiquated Intelligence).........Eureka!!! I believe we have unknowingly solved the global warming issue! T urn them ALL Off and go for a walk.😜
I enjoyed this video so much that I watched the whole entire thing. If you get actual CAD software working on this thing one day, I look forward to hearing about it from you.
I'd rather like to know where this machine actually was used in/for.
Or what constituted that excess of a need so this monstrosity was actually developed...
Kind of: "this computer was designed to crack the Enigma code" situation.
What did this HP200 do, designing the first stealth plane?
@@michac3796 *Nah. Every plantsite had huge glass-walled, raised floor mainframe rooms for that. Our 12 metrology labs used these as instrument controllers running calibration routines in HP Basic or ported/interpreted HPL. CAD was run in darkened rooms on DEC VAX Minis or 3270 terminals with 27" or 30" monochrome CRTs and trackballs. When the h/p Minis and 9000 Series 300's arrived, company-wide all 9836C's went to surplus sales on pallets. That was called a "refresh". Cheers!*
This might be just in the era where some of the cool software didn't have crazy dongles for copy protection. A lot of the neat stuff from later years (like the 90s) is no longer available for anybody, including hobbyists.
@@edherdman9973 *IIRC, by the mid-80s h/p already had the dongle-as-proof-of-license tech down pat. Serial numbered, they plugged into an unused serial, parallel or HPIB port. Buyers choice.*
01:40 "The 9836 is essentially a direct continuation [of the Series 80]"... Not really, as they were designed and made by different divisions: the Series 80 came from Corvallis Division in Oregon (which was the calculator division spun out of the Advanced Products Group in Cupertino in the mid 70s), while the 9836 came from the Desktop Computer Division in Fort Collins, Colorado, building on the earlier desktop calculators such as the 9825. If you compare the HP BASIC that each machine uses, you'll find they have significant differences, to the point where even syntax for many simple commands is incompatible. This is because they were developed independently, with no over-arching HP computing strategy to tie things together. Any similarities are more like convergent evolution than any kind of descendant relationship. (FYI: I worked a lot with HP in the 80s and 90s, and was a heavy user and developer on 200 Series, 500 Series and 80 Series machines, as well as a developer for HP-41 & HP-71, and worked at Corvallis division for a time.)
Maybe I should have specified that is is a continuation "conceptually". It doesn't have anything in common from a technical perspective, other than HP-IB. But it has the BASIC programming focus, alpha/graphics visual layers, focus on interfacing with hardwaere, and several other features not really found in other machines. Maybe it was more just how HP operated at the time, but after having use the Series 80 stuff myself this felt similar but also like a significant evolution of it as well.
IBM offered a workstation option for the 5150. It had an updated graphics card roughly on par with SVGA for a whopping 10k extra dollars. It was specifically to be a cad station.
It was called the Professional Graphics Adapter. It was also sold with the 5272 Color Display and 3270 character ROMS in the 5271 3270 Personal Computer, a special version of the 5160 designed to emulate a 3279 Color Display Terminal. It also had CGA emulation, though the extra colour tricks used with the original CGA card certainly wouldn't work. I actually had a 5271 as a kid- a Model 6 which had the 10MB hard disk drive. That system sold for $8,250 in 1985 with the monitor and special keyboard.
There was also the 3270 PC/GX which added full professional graphics support using the APA (All Points Addressable) display system and a 19-inch 1024x1024 16-colour display. That was the most expensive XT-class PC configuration IBM ever sold, retailing for over $20,000.
@@douro20 I worked for an IBM dealer and I think we only ever sold a PGA once.
Hopefully IBM didn't offer one to the 8-bit guy lol
@@rommix0Lol.. burn
@@radman999 Yeah man. David will never live that moment down.
please make more videos with this machine. maybe someone on vcfed has some more software they could image for you? i'd really love to see you use it with a plotter and a CAD program
That thing really looks like it was the progenitor of the hp9000/200 series. I'm guessing it lacks the MMU required to run HP-UX?
You're dead on! Since this one has the older M68000L based CPU it cannot run HP-UX. There were upgrade kits and later models for it, but there's so little of this stuff out there I doubt I'll ever run across it (or have it be affordable) so this one will likely be the BASIC/Pascal/HPL combo for life.
It also runs CP/M 68K. There was a special version of it produced by Digital Research for HP. I run it on my HP 9816.
We used several of these where I worked (Memorex applied research for disk drives). We did not get them or use them for CAD. Instead we got them to interact with HPIB & GPIB instrumentation because no test instruments existed that could measure what we needed. We also used them for computer based simulations. I recall it being a good deal less than $25,000 so we probably didn't have all the bells & whistles. Comparing the price directly to other computers of the day is very misleading for two reasons (a) the 98x6 came with hardware that the others did not and was expensive to add (b) the build in hardware, such as the HPIB, had very easy to use drivers built in; other computers required massive amount of time to write software to integrate & use such features. For example, PCs needed different graphics software for different graphical capabilities: CGA vs EGA, vs VGA - rewrite when you changed yet all seamless with HP; Want to change from a 1 pen plotter to an 8 pen plotter with HP: disconnect and replace - done! We were in the business of developing disk drive technology, not screen/plotter/interface/whatever software. We did a hard look at the cost of HP 9836C versus an Apple IIe(?) - HPO hardware was clearly more expensive but the cost of adding just the driver software to the Apple negated that. I recall in my lab we had the following attached: plotter. printer, logic analyzer (Biometrics??), Tektronics digitizing oscilloscope, frequency analyzer, laser interferometer, a custom HPIB card, and a GPIO to directly control the test stand for disk seeking & read/write.
*Yep. Good odds it was a Biometrics or Gould. h/p 8-pen plotter 98xxA (not later 7550A) was fun to watch. Man, it was fast. Cheers!*
I work as an engineer and a lot of the older engineers/designers I work with refer to CAD workstations as "Tubes"
I know it refers to the CRT display, but I always wondered what a CAD workstation would've looked like back when that was a contemporary term.
The Tektronix 4010 series of terminals were a popular option for early CAD displays. They could display persistent graphics cheaply with their storage tube technology (could specifically be what your co-workers are referring to?), along the with usual computer terminal functions.
@@martianhighminder4539i’ll have to ask next time. Thanks for the info!
@@Runco990i wonder if any of them used vector graphics like the vectrex.
The first commercial CAD system was on a DEC PDP-1, by Adams Associates and Itek. The display was based on a CRT designed for scan radar, so this was a "serious" tube. (The software was designed in 1961/62.) The PDP-1 was also the first computer that we might call a workstation. (Nowadays we find this often classified as an "early mini", but the first minis - which came after this - were, as a concept, a serious down-grade from the PDP-1 architecture.)
Compare "The First Commercial CAD System" by David Weisberg.
This particular model was not very popular. It got replaced quickly by other workstations. 3 years after this came out, the HP-9000 line came out which would be much more representative of the UNIX boxes (we called them boxes, not tubes). Other popular brands included Sun and SGI.
They were amazing, many having 1024x1024 pixel resolution, optical mouses ("digitizers") and HUGE tubes.
This was HP's first computer that I know of to use a non-HP processor. An electronics shop I frequented quite often- and where I got my 5150 and PS/2 Model 25- had one in the front of the store.
*h/p never made procs. Like old Apple, h/p bought Motorola 68000's for their 9800-series desktop computing controllers. Motorola procs were also used in many bench instruments. 8566A/B spectrum analysers first come to mind. With the LCD display mod, some still in use today. Cheers!*
@@blackrifle6736 They certainly did. There was the "Nanoprocessor" which was used in certain control applications, the D5061-3xxx processor used in the HP 9825 which was a 3-chip hybrid based on the architecture of the HP 2100 minicomputer, the "Capricorn" which was an 8-bit CPU designed specifically for scientific computation used in the HP 80 series computers, the "Saturn" which is a 64-bit processor with a 4-bit data bus and 20-bit address space used in calculators, the "Focus" which was the world's first single-chip 32-bit microprocessor and a whole line of RISC CPUs known as PA-RISC.
This thing essentially runs Rocky Mountain Basic (rmb). That is still around and sold by a company called Transera. It goes under the name HTbasic and is still being actively developed ! Hewlett Packard's RMB is not your garden variety basic. RMB can do matrix transforms, supports complex and imaginary numbers, fourier transforms, urve fitting and a whole slew of mathematical operations. it also has an extensive graphics and plotting instruction set. Displaying and editing charts, tables, graphs is a snap. RMB contains instructions you will not find in any other programming language unless you load libraries or toolkits. RMB has it built- in and part of the language ! The Windows implementation (HTbasic) can run existing code unmodified, but adds a ton of new capabilities , including driving test equipment over LXI (LXI is essentially GPIB over a Lan connection). No need to configure anything : simply issue a read or write command to a "port". The GPIB subsystem behaves as a virtual file. You open the file with the given address and simple read and write. There is no doubt, somwhere in a corner of a huge telescope control room , or military aircraft support cart or similar long-lifespan equipment, one of these still chugging away running 40 year old code on 40 year old hardware , or on a pc running windows 11 with HTbasic. These machines pushed the boundaries of what was possible in the 80's so hard they ended up still being used in 2023.
its so retro it looks futuristic,i remember when a friend brought back a 486 and a 386 from america they where insanely expensive,we downloaded doom from a bbs took forever,and then we transferred it via parallel cable to the second computer so we could play together...my mind was blown.
If you would like a maxed out SRAM card, please let me know. I still have some available from a run I did a while back. 7.5MB is the max ram you can put in a 200 series machine, and these boards let you do that in a single slot, and are much faster (essentially 0 wait state) than the DRAM boards I've tested. I have an SRM server, which is a slightly modified 200, and the one card I wish I could get software for is the 80286 DOS Coprocessor board. I have only heard back from one person who thinks they have the tape with the software but wasn't willing to dump it or send it off to someone who had the capability to dump it.
This HP could run a coprocessor card?
I was an HP field service Engineer back in the 80s/90s we used these to run our calibration software on Network/Spectrum analysers like the HP8510 . The 9826 series was similar but not as powerful with a built in display but only one drive. HP was the best company in the world to work for as an Engineer.
That machine is beyond awesome! 2.7 Mbytes of RAM was unimaginable at the time.
Is it like having 2.7TB of RAM now?
@@typingcat good question. I find translation to today a bit difficult as at the time RAM-size defined which functionalities could run at all where todays RAM-size defines to which memory-size any functionality runs smoothly. At that time one could not create a CAD image at all when the RAM-size was below a certain limit. Today, even the cheapest computers, smartphones and tablets can create CAD images. When the CAD image gets very complicated and big however, things still work but very slow on hardware with not much RAM, less powerful processor and less powerful graphics unit.
The Commodore's 64 Kbytes in 1982 were considered huge, a real step forward. Just a handful of years later, the megabytes were upon us.
This is an incredible machine for 81. I'm old enough to have been involved in the early 80s home computing boom here in the UK. Clearly this machine is a completely different level in terms of its original cost and intended use, but I had no idea of this or its ilk's existence. My Brother works for HP - I'll send him this and see if he or his workmates know it! Great Video!
Your excitement is infectious. It reminded me of all the days and nights as a kid I spent tearing apart old computers and getting excited every time I learned something new.
This brought back memories. You are right, the HP9836C was a beast, back in the day. We ran them on Pascal to test missile hardware. The ones I remembered had a Boot Rom Card, and all we had to load was the program via the floppy. These test stations had all types of instruments connected to the computer, they were very large.
I'll be looking out for the next video.
That is a super interesting machine! I live that time period. So many different implementations of various ideas in play. Lots to learn about.
Thank you for this video! What a fascinating machine. To this day, HP has kept the simple, professional, blocky look of their workstations and I quite like it. I've worked with HP's workstations going back to the mid 1990s but unfortunately never seen something like this in person.
During my first paying job as a programmer around 1983, I worked on the HP 9836A. I got to know that machine and its cousins very well.
The company was called ICG (Integrated Computer Graphics), and they did architectural software (yes, in BASIC) for the home building market. Basically, you would enter the blueprints for a house, and our software would tell you how much it would cost to frame that house in wood. It kicked out schematic drawings, bills of materials, and cut lists. It was chiefly used by pre-fab home manufacturers who would frame the walls on a giant table in a factory, then truck the walls out to the building site and tilt them up. One of the features I wrote was to print out a 1:1 scale ribbon to be taped up on the edge of the assembly table showing exactly where the studs, cripples, and other framing members were to be placed (and there's a weird debugging story behind that one). I retained no copies of this software, nor do I know anyone who did.
Since one of my burning interests at the time was 3D graphics, I wrote some subroutines that rendered the framing schematics as a 3D wireframe. It made the lead programmer happy, as it confirmed that the framing data inside the program was "real."
You're not missing much with the Pascal environment. It's basically an implementation of UCSD Pascal, and it's _awful_ -- the very definition of user-hostile.
More interesting is the MC68000 assembly language development environment. I used it to learn 68K assembly language (just in time for the Amiga), and used it to write a bootable version of Conway's Game of Life. I *_might_* still have a copy of this (the game, not the dev environment)...
The disk format is very primitive. Each catalog entry is basically a filename, a starting offset, and a sector count. There is no sector map -- all files are laid out contiguously. This means you have to re-pack the disk files from time to time.
Later OS versions, both BASIC and Pascal, supported also HFS, which is basically BSD file system.
“Hi honey, I bought one of those new fangled Computers l” - “Oh, how much was it?l
Dude, thanks so much for posting this. Do you remember the name of the Prefab company ? so they were doing that in '83 also? because seems that it's still a "new" idea in the architecture community.
@@gregdee9085 The only client I remember was named Wickes, which I dimly recall as being located in the southeast US. But all the online references I've found don't feel right, and it's possible I'm mis-remembering even that much.
i learned 68000 assembly language too. it was very straightforward and easy. it might have been the first micro with a 16 bit data bus. later spent about 10 years writing assembly for various motorola processors
The only times I've had to deal with drive sector interleaving, was when low-level formatting MFM and RLL HDDs on PC XTs. Of course when IDE or ATA HDDs became a thing, those were factory low-level formatted, and so interleaving wasn't a consideration.
I find it amazing that people like yourself can resurrect old 80s pcs like this meanwhile im struggling trying to get a hdd to register on a 486 so i can load dos 6.22 lol
Those were built to last. From engineers for engineers. And it's the good HP, not the we sell gold ink in tiny cartridges HP.
@Gwi von Galois Bill and Dave are doubtless spinning in their graves over what’s become of the previously cutting edge instrumentation company that they started in a garage and grew to a world technology leader in only a few decades.
A HP 9836, that isn't a PC.
I don't believe you would call a HD Honda in front of a bunch of Bandido members ?
@TheStefanskoglund1 oof that really bothered you huh?
@@patmx5 *Just to put into perspective: By 1980 h/p's computing, printer and plotter divisions were already providing over 60% of h/p's revenue using much less resources and overhead expense. This is why T&M side of h/p kept being deprecated and spun-off and finally ended up as KeySight. Thickest h/p catalog was 1977 edition. Cheers!*
HP was a beast of a company in the 80s. Carly Fiorina utterly destroyed it by sheer ignorance. Never underestimate the stupidity of bean counters…
Perhaps even more so in the 1960s-70s. An actual semiconductor manufacturer (ahead of Intel) which also produced exellent circuit designs at the board level, for instruments, calculators, computers. The last 25-30 years or so, HP has looked more like a "DELL" or like all those small basement firms that simply puts ready made parts from Asia together.
@@herrbonk3635that's because HP today is just zombie Compaq
@@matthewkriebel7342 I'm still bitter that Digital Equipment Corporation was sold to Compaq. I'm sure they made good use of that legacy.
Blame intel who cannot design an ISA
@@herrbonk3635 @@@ The last 25-30 years or so, HP has looked more like a "DELL" or like all those small basement firms that simply puts ready made parts from Asia together.@@@ Ugh, guys, that were US people who heavily protested against new microelectronics fabs because of their toxicity... So instead of improving production Asian guys were offered to place that toxic stuff on their lands. Of course they won't let their 50 years old tech go back.
Your explanation of the disk interleave is close, but a little off. The additional time afforded by staggering the sectors was not because the computer was not fast enough to process the data, Remember, the circuits are typically an order of magnitude or faster than the physical hardware in the drive. The issue was when the next sector was on a different track and the drive arm had to reposition. That at least how it worked when I was using Spinrite a little later on the PC for harddisks. I never saw it used on floppy disk drives before. The original Mac used that crazy scheme to get extra data on the outer tracks and change the arrangement on the inner tracks on the disk drive.
Watching you work with the original equipment from when I was a kid is a real pleasure. Your channel is great!!!
No Shelby's description was correct, interleaving is used for sectors on a single track for when the CPU cannot process the data quick enough, it's not related to track to track seeks. You might be thinking of zoning (or notching in SCSI jargon) which is where different tracks have different sectors counts to allow greater capacity.
*God bless Steve Gibson for creating SpinRite. He saved my bacon too many times to count. Cheers!*
Was great to see this. I was able to use a 9836 in the early 80's when I was a co-op student working for a research unit in a company that later spun into PMC Sierra. I wrote a fairly large (for the day) simulation in HP Basic. I think I have the printout in my work term report filed away someplace. It was such a cool machine- loved that rotary scroll wheel when programming.
There were "hpcat" and "hpcopy" DOS programs that could read and write the HP's "LIF" format as used by the 200. You had to format the floppies on the 200, then you could read/write them on a DOS PC. I probably still have these somewhere.
in 1985 my brother-in-law owned a video rental store, I remember getting dibs on the latest VHS videos as they came in. One day, this slick guy walked into the store and sold my brother-in-law a $10K HP computer with another $5K in software and keyboard and mouse and another $3K for onsite technical support and another $1k for training for a few hours. A lot of damn money in 1985! But he was making lots of money at his rental store! he still has that computer somewhere at home and sometimes we talk about the most expensive computer on earth that never worked hahaha 🤭
I love the deep dive you take for old tech. I really appreciate the effort.
I remember my friend's dad having something similar at work. He was using it to design communications towers and stress measures. It may have been an earlier model as before he was assigned it, he was given a presentation first batch new era Motorola CPU (to memory it was the 68000) that was at the heart of the computer. One of the demos on the computer he showed me and his son was a planet gravity simulator.
*Correct. It was Motorola 68000. Cheers!*
hELLO wORLD
What a fabulous machine. I love seeing workstation computers in action; must be something to do with using Sun 3s at the start of my IT career, although perhaps these kinds of HP beasties are a class of their own.
I wonder with its HP-IB if this series would’ve also found use for controlling HP test equipment as well as running CAD - it seems to be a major use-case for its predecessors such as the HP 85.
The lab measuring engine crank axle gears (and other gears too) at Volvo in Skövde (so todays truck operations) had a measuring machine with a HP 9000 as a front.
I would expect at least one example program for running a HP tone generator in that example disk.
Shelby's determination and focus never ceases to amaze me.
I used to be a Systems Engineer at HP for these machines. They were fantastic and extraordinarily well built. Although I enjoyed the video, there is lots of incorrect info. While it was popular for CAD, it was more often used for instrument control (at least in my part of the world). As mentioned by others, the BASIC environment was incredible; I wish a similar BASIC was available now. Full schematics were available so that lots of users built custom cards for it. For its time it was magnificent. Being the top of the line it sold in smaller numbers than its less expensive brethren (9816, 9826). Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
*HP-IB controller? Yes, by the hundreds. On every engineering Dept manager's desk? Yes, and we had LOTS of managers. CAD? Never saw one used for that. Cheers!*
I'm wondering about the weird disk images. The 5.25 and 3.5 drives used the same 34-pin bus but different connectors. But "universale floppy cables" were pretty common for a while. Is it possible, that in an attempt to save the data, someone replaced a drive with a more modern 3.5inch, formatted a disk and copied files over? or they used a data recovery service to get as much as possible off a set of floppies and the data they got back was written to a 3.5?
Sidenote: the '70s and '80s floppy market is confusing! Tandon made hardware for Tandy, aquired Atasi and was competing with the makers of SASI, which was not *yet* SCSI. Somewhere in there, I'm sure Tandem also bought hardware from Tandon as well as having SASI interfaces, for use in their machines, which didn't compete with Tandy. Atari certainly bought Tandon FDDs but I don't think they ever did business with Atasi! Tandem probably did buy Atasi drives from Tandon and connected to them using SASI, which was probably by then extended and renamed SCSI.
I think that the HP 68000 in that machine has custom microcode, I think. Motorola did something similar for IBM with a 68000 board set that can run 370 mainframe code.
Oh, another thing:
26:35: *_AAAGGHHH!!!_*_ Do not put magnetic media on top of a CRT!_ Some monitors have a degaussing coil at the front -- not to mention the magnetic deflection yoke at the back. There may be _some_ magnetic shielding in there, but you're basically asking for your floppies to be erased when you put them on top of a monitor. Just don't do it.
I thought the same thing. I guess some people just didn't experience the consequences... Back then you had to treat floppies, very very carefully, not just how you touch it but where you put it, always mindful of invisible electro magnetic destruction, such as CRTs, Speakers and Power Supplies...
Yes!!! AKA the Cinco MIDI Organizer 😂
that disk emulator program is fucking jaw dropping. you just don't see stuff to solve such specific problems for legacy hardware anymore, let alone provided by the company that made said hardware. hp used to be lit.
I love old HP equipment. They didn't do anything by half!
Oh my, what a blast from the past. I have one of those in climate controlled storage, just can't remember the state. I know I have everything for it. Terms of system disks and such. It was a wonderful machine. I created guitar, violin, etc. Components on it. I don't know as I recall I did everything in basic but I can't recall. Hopefully my kids didn't get into that unit and sell everything in there.
Man what a blast from the past. I ran on of those stations back in 86/87 I believe the Company I worked for bought the system in 84 or 85. Racking my brain to remember the cad software we used. I remember the company was bought out by Carrier corperation (Pretty sure). We had two 9836c stations connected to a hard disk that was the size of a 2 drawer file cabinet with a tape drive on top. I Think it was a 7933 drive 400 mb. and a 8 pin hp plotter. I was told the whole system set the company back $100k, back when I made $5.50 an hour. We used it till 1989 when we switched to pc's on a token ring network with dual Sun Sparc servers/ Workstations. And AutoCadd. with DCA.
cough Zed Ex 81 cough cough
but no seriously quite an interesting beast of a machine this thing was for 1981
Very cool. We had at least 4 of these computers donated to my college lab from HP. We wrote our our cad program and tons of test measurement software. Mostly in pascal. I converted most of those to an HP RISC machine later on. We used the RS232 for all data transfer, writing our own software on both sides. There were many expansion cards. One had a programming language on it. Might have been BASIC. We also had an external hard drive connected to it. And used the HP-IB to connect to all our testing stations. One of our computers had all the 1MB memory cards in it. It was a beast.
Wow, I didn't know you could even get a 68000 processor that ran at 8MHz back in 1981! I thought 4MHz was the absolute tops then.
8mhz 68000 was released in 1980. 10mhz was available in 1981.
@@TMS5100 I stand corrected! 😄
@@TMS5100 Crazy to think what the % jump in speed from 8 to 10mhz represented back then.
Can you use the win 98 machine to emulate the 3.5" drives / unusable images. Load that to the HP, and then write it back to the 5" drive? Making a compatible image?
Or emulate other drives on the 98 machine and write the data to those. Basically, do one for every series of drive so it's archived.
That's pretty much what I'm going to be trying to do, but I want to write the files to real disk drives to eliminate the emulation side of it. So far I think it's been working fine, but I want to rule that out as causing issues. I should be able to put a Gotek in place of a 5.25" and 3.5" drive if I start making good progress to work directly with images instead.
I cut out a section of this video (because it was already long enough) where I mention that you have to go through a bunch of conversion steps on Windows 98 to even get the files working with the emulator. I'm hoping to come up with an all modern workflow on linux that will be more maintainable because all of the tools to work with the files right now are closed source.
I got my first computer hard drive in 1989. It was a whopping 20mb and I thought "I'll never fill this up!"
Quite nice paperweight or brick. All custom, and very difficult to find and expensive even today. Nice video 👌
It's always a good day when Tech Tangents uploads!
This is a fantastic blast from the past, well done 👍
I loved the microwave aesthetic of the CRT.
Amazing machine but also amazing to realise that within 4-5 years the Amiga and ST did more for a tiny fraction of the price. The pace of evolution with tech in the 80's was breath taking.
This was absolutely amazing. My father was into all these old machines back in the early 80's, from Superbrain CP/M machines to Cromemco System 3 with 4 8 inch floppy drives. I was a very young kid playing on these systems and learned BASIC and how to use CP/M back then. My dad had used all this stuff to make a point of sale system and parts lookup for his Honda/Kawasaki motorcycle dealership in like 1983 which is absolutely INSANE to think how forward thinking that was. He made his own software in BASIC from books full of program listings, making modifications, even had transferred parts libraries from HONDA from mainframe format to old 10 MB hard drives. He spent tens of thousands on all that stuff. I remember he told me he paid like $3000 for a 10mb hard drive that was in a whole separate box - I can close my eyes and still remember seeing it from when I was maybe 6 or 7.
17:03 Kind of confusing when you show IBM PC stuff, talks about "DOS" and points at the 68K machine. What do you mean by "DOS Basic" there? Are you using the acronym "DOS" for "disk operating system" rather than MS-DOS? I hope it's no MS BASIC on that HP.
I used one of these, once, in a previous employer for controlling HPIB instruments for a task that if I told you, I'd have to kill you. Still beiing used in at least 2015. If that's not a solid bit of kit then I don't know what is.
*Ha, ha! Roger, that. Black Programs in abundance, all with cash to spend on top tier hardware that kept us employed. Cheers!*
I remember as a kid looking at Tandy computers in the early 1980s and they started at $2000 in Australia - it may was as well have been $20,000 for all the average teenager could afford. Thank God for Commodore and Jack Tramiel.
I've heard about this computer, but never saw one before. This is just freaking wild to see.
Fantastic, just this video alone made my monthly internet payment worth it, it brought back memories from 40 years ago when I used an HP-85 to run RF circuit simulation to design filters, antennas and many other related circuits, thanks for making stuff like this !
*Had forgotten about the 85. Used to run an Allen Variance cal program for ovenised Xtal oscillators on one. Cheers!*
The cool thing about this type of video is the awesome comments 😁 I soooo wanna go back to the 80's 😁
As I type this, I am developing code on the RPi Pico but running PicoMite BASIC (interpreter) and overclocked to 378MHz. Since the 80's, BASIC coding has been paying my bills 💪👍
This was released in 1981, and the Amiga arrived in July 1985 with a full WIMP environment and multitasking. Just four years difference, and the same hardware essentially became commoditised.
You are the hairier Adam Driver of ancient computers.
RUclipsr Curious Mark is an expert on HP equipment
9:51 - That error means it's ready to play Pole Position.
Youth today will never appreciate what us X'ers had to go through back in the 80's to get to how seamless everything is today!
It looks like a POS (point of sale) and type writer smashed into each other at 530pm in a traffic jam and fused together
Old technology looks so cool i get why you and others love it so much
Looks like they pulled the engineers that did their test equipment to design and build it. Multiple backplanes, beefy supply, tons of expansion and everything and built like a tank.