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- Опубликовано: 20 июл 2016
- 1979, a screaming 613KHz clock, killer graphics, and it's a Hewlett Packard, it doesn't get much better than this!
Dave powers up the the classic HP85 Scientific / Engineering Professional Personal Computer and has a play around.
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I used an HP 85 at Caltech in 1982-83 to calculate and plot frequency responses for laser interferometer gravitational wave detectors (our project became LIGO, though we didn't pick the name until later). We had the HPIB expansion module and a 5-color pen plotter. Really slick for the times.
BTW I still work on LIGO. We have much faster computers now.
RUclips needs a "Like" button just for this comment. :)
Wow! LIGO!
My Dad's office had one of these but no one knew how to use it. I at age 12 spent time in the office and learned basic on it. My Dad brought it home and I continued to learn on it. I am a software engineer to this day. Fond memories of this computer. HP did actually make two games tapes that had a collection simple games on them. I used the basic language to make some rudimentary games. There were some simple sound commands in the basic language as well. I eventually moved on to the Vic-20 and then Commodore 64 which seemed like a big step down in some ways and big step up in others. Thanks for posting this video.
Bring me back to over 30 years ago in China, when I was only 13, I got one from my father, who used to work for HP. I didn't know much English, and my father translated the manual for me, then I started to learn BASIC programming on it. it was a great computer and I really enjoyed it, made many fun games and won a few programming champions in my school. Even now I have a 8 core, 64GB ram mobile workstation, I still love my HP 85.
Wow, did this bring back memories. The first computer my company would buy for my own use, as a mere Research Assistant (glorified technician). I learned the HP basic which differed from just about everybody elses. It was slow, but I seldom had to find any other device to get my data printed and graphed to my supervisor's satisfaction, it was so complete and reliable.
I used that computer when I was a TA at MIT. I wrote some scientific programs for medical instruments. It was in 1981.
Wow it's like a dedicated MATLAB machine and doesn't cost $200 a year!
just 3 grand once
Used these at work in the early 80's. They had IEEE interface to an in-house tape reader to read or calibrate oilfield pressure gauge logging tools. When the tool became obsolete i was given an HP85 and had a lot of fun going through the excellent programming manual. I remember writing a Mandelbrot set program that took hours to complete. Like all HP calculator manuals of the time the manual was almost a complete programming course
My HP85 had two HPIB (proprietary V.35) connectors, one for a sprocket feed printer, and one for a Frequency Selective Voltmeter. A 3,200 line HP BASIC program controlled the voltmeter (taking 2,700 measurements each run), printed any out of bounds readings, and graphed the composite results for the bosses' overview. It was the equivalent of a slow scan Spectrum Analyzer, dirt cheap, user friendly, reliable, and saved our hides from FCC complaints about spectrum abuse. Customers noticed the improvement in quality of service within weeks of putting this into nightly use. The day shifts concentrated on identifying and correcting faults that the HP85 discovered at night.
Fun fact: Playing the video at 2x speed will overclock the computer to 1.2 MHz
Yes, but it was good that he showed it in its real original speed. People nowadays do not know how slow computing was at that time.
I turned it into a quantum computer by going from frame 00:00 to 22:59.
@@galier2 Being patient is a virtue. What was attractive was the power and mathematics/graphing abilities.
We had several of the "big brother" machines, the HP 9845. We used them extensively for analysis of electrical measurement from test wafers during device and process development for x86 microprocessors. In addition to the ROM and RAM plug-in options, they also had I/O (like 16 bit input and output). I developed hardware and software to program the 9845s to actually perform the "E-test" functions using the Lomac computer-driven test hardware.
I got to use one for a single day in 1981, to do "what if" calculations. My very first taste of computing. Happy memories - thank you!
Gosh that takes me back. I was an acoustician working for the UK MoD and we used one of these in our laboratory in the late 70's or early 80's. What an excellent machine it was!
My first real computer encounter (belonged to the company). Had only ever programmed my HP11C calculator before. Within 2 days I was able to write and use a test program for some PCB we produced. With HP-IB bus we hooked up a color plotter printing the test results. Never had such a short learning period ever again after :-)
Did some programming on one of these little guys where I worked in the 80's while attending university. It ran 24/7 like a champ and had two jobs. First it communicated via modem with the on campus phone switch and logged calls and did some initial parsing of data before handing it off to the HP3000 for student and faculty billing. Second it communicated, again via modem, with a petrol dispensing system at the physical plant and logged fuel usage and levels and passed the data off to the HP3000 for record keeping and billing.
My first computer! In fact i'm a bit of an expert!
It has HP BASIC built in...
Programmes have to finish with 'END'
When it boots it will search all mass storage for a programme called "AUTOST"
My first computer was my uncle's old TI-99/4A, which was the first PC with a 16-bit processor. It didn't have a storage drive, so I couldn't turn it off. It was good for learning TI-BASIC and playing Q-Bert. My parents bought an AST Windows 95 PC from Radio Shack a few years later for $1600. I remember being amazed seeing Weezer's "Buddy Holly" music video on the Windows 95 machines in stores. We later spent $300 to upgrade the 8 MB of RAM to 12 MB.
These make a great little "old school" test instrument controller with the 82937A HPIB/IEEE488 interface, many were used for that purpose in the 1980's. The DC100 tape drive was nice for portability but the tapes aren't too reliable. I use a HP 9121D diskette drive with mine, it's much better than dealing with those tapes. I've written data logging programs for my Fluke bench meters and HP spectrum analyzers and counters for the HP85, it's a simple and cost effective way to use HPIB at a hobbyist price level.
that rom drawer was a cool idea, probably ahead of its time
Wow. That computer is a really cool and unique piece of pre-IBM PC computer history. Plus, it contains one of my favorite quirks of old computers, SLOW DRAW TIME!!! Seriously, I love seeing old computers slowly drawing all the graphics. None of that instant crap!
I had a program for my Commodore 64 that would generate the Mandelbrot set. It would take about a half hour to generate the entire set, after which you could select an area to zoom in on and regenerate. Successive zooms took exponentially longer. I think the longest I left it rendering for was two days, at which point I got impatient and rebooted to play Raid Over Moscow.
Well its beautiful if your screen is smoothly updating horizontally in about a second for a frame, but if you use anything like VNC you will soon find out that you fucking HATE IT!!!
There is no such thing as "the entire Mandelbrot set". It''s like calculating the last digit of pi. There is only the precision limit of the calculations.
Jamie Hanrahan *sigh* All right. The overall familiar "shape" that is commonly referred to as the Mandelbrot set, down to 'x' iterations of resolution.
IBM actually had a somewhat similar machine in 1975: IBM 5100.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_5100
Weight 24 kg and prices from ca. $9000.
Geez, I remember writing a full transcendental BCD math library in assembler for the Z80, with two digit exponents and 16 digit mantissa. Accumulated binary representation errors *were* an issue back in the day of single and double-precision binary math. I can see why HP went in the direction they did.
isn't current computing also using single/double precision binary math?
We had one of these in the Microbiology Department where I worked. Almost all the software was tape-based, and so the need to understand HP's rather "unusual" version of BASIC was not essential. Although the available memory was "tiny" by today's standards, that machine could cope with pretty advanced statistics no problem (e.g. 2-way analysis of variation). Used it a lot for the day-to-day computational elements of my Ph.D. (but I'll admit to getting the graphs in the final Thesis drawn on a "real" Mainframe and A4 plotter :-) )
that is so cool seeing where computing started and seeing you program it is something we take for granted with one mouse click it would take decades for this to do what computers can do today shows how far we have come its INSANE!
LOL, this was SPACE AGE! Computing STARTED about WW 2, computers took up whole wings of buildings, they ran on vacuum tubes and girls on roller skates carried spare tubes to replace them as needed. In the early 60s techs DREAMED of computers the size of an office desk! Where computers started, not here!!!!!
My very first work computer was a HP85 - we wrote programmes to calibrate Ultrasonic Test Equipment from 1980 through to 1989! Heyyy … these puppies did the job! During the 19 80s - we started to use the larger HP45 monochrome PCs then this lead us to using the COLOUR - HP45C! I remember these weighing a tonne! I only started using mainstream IBM computers from 1991 at work. I first bought my own home PC in 1997. Its hard to believe how far PCs have developed in 28 years!
I owe my career to the HP85. I bought one the first day it was available, and went on to work for HP in the calculator lab in Corvallis. Great machine - working with the people there was like walking the hallways with gods. Incredible!
This was the first ever computer I ever saw. My dad brought one home from work I remember being amazed though just being aware it was something special and not knowing what it was capable of.
Still have one of these in my closet from 1980. We, at H-P Analytical, used it as the interface to the HP1040 Photodiode Array Detector for HPLC.
Stephan George
HPLC?
Bring it to a starbucks and start typing on it!
Don`t forget to ask them for wifi
record it to
Be sure to wear your polyester disco leisure suit! -with the floral print shirt and yer gold chain necklace.
ask them for a wall outlet. or bring a car battery + inverter.
He's in Australia so no Starbucks here
This is absolutely wonderful! A joy to watch. What an amazing machine.
Amusing to think that this is pretty close to the TI-83's that are still on store shelves. Actually being able to print from my TI calculator would have been a useful thing at school :)
A friend had one of these at University. It was a great machine. The digital tape drive was nice because it was addressable and could find programs a data sets without manual manipulation.I wrote a lot of programs on this machine which was nice in that its screen graphics and printable graphics were nice. I had an English to Angerthast rhune translator because Tolkien was riding high in the early 80s. Eventually my friend traded for an 87 which gained an 80 column screen but lost the tape drive and the embedded printer.
Thanks for these three videos on this machine. Extremely interesting.
I used this one in 1982 in highschool! Now working at HP 😀. Memories.....
Never seen one of these before - awesome!
This machine was a breakthrough in computing power over price and miniaturization at the time.
Believe it or not.
Sheeit, that looks nice. I would have absolutely killed for that when I was a kid.
It's odd that they claim to have rolled their own CPU just for BCD arithmetic, though, since both the 8086 and the z80 (which should have been in the design time-frame for this, I think) are well-known for having rather extensive BCD facilities.
Perhaps they were able to almost drag and drop bits of the maths logic from their calculators into the CPU? I first coded machine code in Z80, I remember it having some BCD support, I didn't think it was extensive but then I didn't use the BCD functions.
I have 2 of these. Both have a broken tape drive. Apparently, the rubber on the drive axle turns into goo after a certain number of years. Maybe it destroys the tapes, so fix it before you try other tapes. With Google, you will find several links about fixing the tape drive. This was "state of the art" when I started my masters education at the university. No fan, so they are completely silent when the tape drive is idle.
I love this machine. Kind of genius in its design. Very cool.
Love that original Byte review. They did that for most things they reviewed right up until they closed. I remember their review of the original IBM PC, with technical information on everything, and big photographs of both the final board and pre-production board covered with bodge wires. Awesome stuff.
I used one of these when I was contracted to the USGS in the mid '80s. It was used to analyze and process seismic data from our PDRs (Portable Data Recorders) that used the same tapes to store data from seismometers. These were fielded to determine if a locations background noise, whether natural or manmade, was low enough to consider it for a new seismic station.
Thumbs up!! I felt giddy watching this. I would have done anything for a toy like this back in the day.
I was soo happy when it printed ! :)
Thanks for the video! 😊 Looking to pick one of these up this week!
Man, you just made me buy 2 of them on eBay. All as-is, but I will definitely get one HP85B working out of them. This computer has a great meaning in my life and it was on my bucket list to get one of them at some point. Back in 1985, (16 years old) I was an electrician trade school trainee back in Brazil. I had just started studying computer science at night school. Someone at this huge company asked me if I could code an app to produce tables and graphics (something like Excel and Tableau does today), in fact, they named it "Tableau de Board" (it was a big French multinational company). I got my first computer programmer job (34 years ago). I worked with the HP85B and the Tektronix 4054 (one I'm using on my picture). Cheers!!!
Thanks a lot for sharing this !
Never used one of these but did use an HP9836 computer in a lab when I used to work at a fiber optics lab at Bellcore back in the mid to late 1980s. Had HP-IB and could talk to all the HP and Tektronix lab equipment. So I'd program up the instructions to run a test, collect the data then plot out the results using a pen plotter. It was like watching a robot working.
www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=3
Something very calming about watching the PC draw to the screen whenever it is good and ready...
In 1980 I was working at Rockwell as an engineer on the Shuttle Orbiter, that was when Rockwell decided to help all of us engineering types to get help to needed to purchase a desktop computer. There was one that was the Rockwell Desktop Computer. I went on to purchase a IBM DESKTOP because we needed them for scientific work. Apple was for education primary and most others were Buisness Machines, CP/M.
I used an HP85 in ‘83.
I wrote a program to calculate point coordinates from trig survey for it. The maths was easy - it was the formatting of input and output, and plotting results that took time.
I also got hold of a primitive modem so that I could communicate with my head office in Johannesburg. Two technicians came from the post office - one to plug the 23:00 modem into the power socket and the other to connect the computer and modem into the telephone line. When I had finished in the area, I unplugged the modem & took it back to the PO. They told me, no, I must take it back to my office and reinstall it. They then sent two technicians round to unplug it and take it away.
this stuff is always fascinating
that thing supported RS-232 interface (@17:21, middle column) so it *was* designed for tomorrow!
great stuff!
RS-232 dates back into the 60s actualy.
congratulations dave!
that's a beautiful machine, mate....and now it can retire in your safe hands.
cheers for posting this, by the way. it's brought on a huge nostalgic moment and I feel the need to go and fire up my old vic20 :)
Nice review!
I used one in 1988 for my final Engineering project. It was connected via GPIB to a VERY expensive HP Parametric Analyser which was connected to a wafer probe station. I was validating SPICE models of transistors again actual wafer transistor structures. It was a bit peculiar as I was by then used to IBM PC's but its ability to interface was fantastic and HP engineering quality then was just outstanding.
Back in 80th of the past century we used this HP-85 programming implantable Vitatron Cardiac pacemakers. It was state of the art technology back then. Vitatron was the first manufacturer of complete software driven implantable cardiac pacemakers.
The way Dave marvels at fit-to-envelope design, I marvel at thermal engineering in thermal print heads. Heating that element up to cause a state change in the wax and cooling down for the next pixel beside it...rapidly enough in modern credit card printers to print several inches of receipt in one second. How many man-months of design went into the first usable thermal print head and paper?
I'm surprised noone has mentioned it yet, but 'mho' was the unit for conductance, before it changed its name to siemens.
Used this in a college engineering class back about 36 years ago. Can't remember all the details, but I think the big features were the graphics capability with hard copy you could print and include with your assignments.
We had one of these at AWA Microelectronics Pty Ltd when I started working there in 1980.
I didn't use it personally -- test engineers like me used a couple of PDP-8 minicomputers -- but I was suitably impressed.
Yes, it ran at 0.6MHz, and we probably thought it was slow, but there was nothing to compare it to.
saw one on the counter when I bought my HP-41c in 1980 loved the keyboard
Cool piece of equipment! I love computer equipment that was used for testing and automated testing purposes. I worked with Lockheed Martin's Consolidated Automated Support System. That was a giant 5 rack machine with a microVAX at the heart of it running VMS 5.2. It could interface and test just about any piece of avionics that went in the F-14, F/A-18 and S-3 Viking aircraft. Then I later worked at the remnant of Hughes Electronics and worked with all kinds of weird custom testing gear for verifying assemblies in production. One of those assemblies was a Sony branded CRT that we produced!
we had one sitting at the university lab shelf. It was been used along with a HP digital analyzer. But it got replaced with a "newer" one. ;)
I still remember the buzz I first got my hands on one of these beasties, back in the day.
LOVE the Jeopardy! font in the brochure
your voice makes this video non boring but fun to watch!
Fantastic video, thank you
Wow, remember using these when I started working at a materials testing laboratory in the late 1980's, we did run them coupled to testing equipment like dynamometers and impact meters to produce graphs of the testing data.
The actual signal from the load cell came in via an A/D coverter that was a separate box and a RS232 cable to the interface module that was plugged in the back of the machine.
After playing around with the ZX Spectrum computer with it's drive that used standard audio casettes the high speed tape drive was a real delight, it now only took you half a minute to load a programme instead of the 5-10 minutes with the Spectrum.
You had to run the program via a manual command when starting the test, because there was no control connection to the test machine.
Those keyboards were really good indeed, with a very nice click feeling of the switches.
In 1992 they became obsolete and were displaced by new 286 or 386 PC's which were state of the art then (and did cost as much as the HP-85), from now on we had full control over test equipment that had built in A/D coverters and control via a built in RS232 port.
To show how long computing equipment can last in professional use, the plant in the factory where I work now is still controled by software based on 486 machines (DOS operating system!) that came with it in 1993.
The control system proved very reliable over all these years, but the sourcing of spares for the hardware has become a problem, because you can't run the programs on new computers anymore, and you can't connect these to the old PLC's anymore, so a grand upgrade of the whole control system is needed now.
Ages before internet, or even BBSs I worked with one of those, but we didn't used it too much as those tapes were very expensive. I even took classes at HP to use it and everyone there had one at his desk. Those sold on Brazil were castrated because of protecionist laws, so they had only one expansion slot on the back. They were not exactly powerful, but they were ergonomic (even with that tiny screen) and beautiful, they were not as yellowed (plastic gets yellow because of UV light with time). The tape noise was charming and depending of how you wrote (yes you could have databases on tape too) the noise changed.
awesome. great to see so much from such small resources. and heres smartphones with a gig of ram taking a minute to boot
What a cool machine. I don't remember these at all, but it would have been all kinds of fun in 1980 (and still now).
watching it run is more exciting than my computer today
+EEVblog A great video about this machine I didn't know. I was only 10 when it came out, so professional computers weren't in my environment. Anyway, I like the build of this machine, particularly easy to service. What I like most are the manuals, so complete ! I have an old Tektronic 2430 oscilloscope and I had a Commodore 64, and the manuals, like the ones from HP, are GREAT ! After reading them, one knows everything about the machine. This time is long gone, alas...
lol that intro cracked me up ... people with their old bag (cell) phones have nothing on that bag!
This reminds me quite a bit of the IBM 5100, the immediate predecessor to the PC. It was very similar in both form and function, and it was sold to the same crowd.
yes but that one used stooopid binary arithmetics, not ultra-smart BCD arithmetics (what the hell BCD arithmetics is is something I still need to check)
This machine is not really a PC, but it is a self-contained microprocessor based desktop computer.
This machine is not meant for the layman.
Forget that! Remember the TRS-80 Model 4P Portable? That was a beast!
We had a bunch of these in our lab in the mid 1980's. I remember one of the engineers had a filter design program on the 85 which took about 20 minutes to run. We took delivery of an HP 9816 (16 MHz 68000?) a year after I started. I made a bet that I could get the filter design program running on the HP9816 and have it finish in the time it took the HP85 to run the program. I won the bet.
Akron Standard FVM tire force variation machine harmonics and diameter run-out tasks, still had HP A600 computers with 3.5" floppies in use in 2016 testing tires.
HP Basic 5 was also known as Rocky Mountain Basic or RMB. For it's time it was very sophisticated, having many features of traditional compiled high level languages such as defined functions, subprograms, native support for complex numbers and matrix manipulation as well as a highly versatile IO command set for use with HPIB (aka IEE488) compatible devices. Although much slower than compiled languages, you could get a compiler for it which would speed up the code quite a bit. It was a very powerful and versatile tool especially in a laboratory environment.
Screw MATLAB... I'm using this for school.
Go for it... :) www.kaser.com/hp85.html
+Mick7sp That's awesome. Thanks haha. I was thinking my laptop was too portable and it would be better to buy one online and carry it to class with me haha.
Evan Stoddard
Lol... Enjoy!
... This has to be the most amazing link I've ever seen Emulation wise. I thought The BBC Micro was rudementery
DFX2KX
Keep in mind the HP85 came out almost 5 years before the BBC Micro. :)
I'd be so happy to have such thing back in... 1995 when I was calculating my college projects using just ...calculator.
Used these at David Sarnoff Labs in New Jersey and at their spin-off, Solarex Corp. to test experimental amorphous silicon solar cells back in the early Eighties. Great computer for R&D. Rugged and reliable.
thing of beauty !
I don't know if it was this particular model but there was one that look very similar running the spectrograph at school.
HP used to make a lot of this kind of computers / calculators. Dad still has a 41CX Scientific Calculator with a magnetic strip card reader to load up the program and an interface to connect to vibration measuring device. It could predict when bearing where needing replacement in motors with out even opening it up.
A couple of years ago spotted a HP-86 at a "recycling" centre, I asked if I could take it knowing machines of that vintage are getting much rarer, they declined. I'd offer them money if I had any at the time.
finally i get to know what the "roll" key is for :D
This thing is awesome, the oldest machines grew up with had Windows XP, gutted I missed out on systems like these! (Or maybe that's a case of 'careful what you wish for')
Awesome old school 😎
i actually got two of these, with all the accessories
it's actually intended to be hooked up to all your hp test equipment... such as frequency generators and that sorta thing. they didn't see much use on their own. you'll find that pretty much all hp electronics test equipment has the same connector on the back.
We had one of these that was connected to our Brown & Sharpe CMM.
I used one these to plot filter responses back in the mid 80s.
Awesome!
Nice watch!
When I went to work for HP in 1979 this was a fantastic machine, though VERY EXPENSIVE.
The tape drive was optional and VERY EXPENSIVE.
There was a very good educational program that guided the user through all the functions available, it used the graphics capabilities of the screen to provide an animated user experience. This was very SEXY in 1979.
You could actually buy a machine without the tape drive and load programs from other machines, so I was tasked with writing a system that could load the user guide from another machine onto one without a tape drive. I had to modify the user guide program to fetch modules of the guide from the other machine rather than from the onboard tape drive
I had to write it is a mixture of BASIC and ASSEMBLER language.
In 1979 of course HP was the original fantastic scientific company built by Bill and Dave who were still alive.
HP would ship out new products to all the regional offices on a regular basis, large packages would arrive all the time which we eagerly unpacked and proceeded to dive into these unbelievable products.
It was like Christmas Day only10 to 12 times a year.
Those were truly amazing days that I was so fortunate to experience.
14:08 holy shit it prints????? thats fucking awesome!
You'll need to roam more flea markets to get one of these, you should make a video about this one too :D
I enjoyed this video.
This things is amazing.
Way cool. We used one for many years with the HP-3497A datat acquisition unit for student labs. A;; done in basuc. Absolutley faultless.
That intro had me in tears.
Brings back some fond "memories"; no pun intended!
error 92 syntax! that's great. love old tech.