May 2016
HP-86B
15/05/16 08:52
A fellow by the name of Steve very kindly gave me a Hewlett-Packard 86B "calculator" along with a neat little 9" green monochrome screen (82912A), three HP-IB cables and a ROM "drawer" (82936A) containing a few HP ROMs. I've since added an RS232 serial interface (82939A).
I just love this little computer - the keyboard is awesome.
The first thing I did was customise the LED, replacing the original amber LED with a 'modern' blue LED!
The computer comes with a built-in HP-IB (GP-IB, IEEE488) interface to which you would connect everything - disk drives, tape drives, plotters, instrumentation …
It also has four expansion ports into which I've got the ROM drawer and serial interface plugged in. You could also plug in other expansion boards, including a Z80 with its own 64kB of RAM so you could run CP/M software.
The ROM drawer accepts HP-specific ROMs - Steve kindly gave me the I/O (00087-15003), plotter (00087-15002) and advanced programming (00087-15005) ROMs. There is an 82929A interface card that allows you to use your own programmed ROMs but as they are hard to come by someone has figured out the schematic.
Its CPU is a HP custom chip codenamed Capricorn which runs at 625kHz! Considering that home computers of the same era typically ran at 4MHz this is a little … different. But the HP Series 80 computers were designed with a different purpose in mind.
I found a short fractal generation program and gave it a try - this fourth order Koch snowflake took about 1hr 46min to generate:
Steve has also given me a massive HP 6942A multiprogrammer (that is for another post). I've got it hooked up to the 86B via the HP-IB and I've managed to poll it with the SPOLL command. My challenge for May is to get them talking to each other - an interesting exercise. Let's see how I go! Gotta learn about HP-Basic, HP-IB and the multiprogrammer!
I just love this little computer - the keyboard is awesome.
The first thing I did was customise the LED, replacing the original amber LED with a 'modern' blue LED!
The computer comes with a built-in HP-IB (GP-IB, IEEE488) interface to which you would connect everything - disk drives, tape drives, plotters, instrumentation …
It also has four expansion ports into which I've got the ROM drawer and serial interface plugged in. You could also plug in other expansion boards, including a Z80 with its own 64kB of RAM so you could run CP/M software.
The ROM drawer accepts HP-specific ROMs - Steve kindly gave me the I/O (00087-15003), plotter (00087-15002) and advanced programming (00087-15005) ROMs. There is an 82929A interface card that allows you to use your own programmed ROMs but as they are hard to come by someone has figured out the schematic.
Its CPU is a HP custom chip codenamed Capricorn which runs at 625kHz! Considering that home computers of the same era typically ran at 4MHz this is a little … different. But the HP Series 80 computers were designed with a different purpose in mind.
I found a short fractal generation program and gave it a try - this fourth order Koch snowflake took about 1hr 46min to generate:
Steve has also given me a massive HP 6942A multiprogrammer (that is for another post). I've got it hooked up to the 86B via the HP-IB and I've managed to poll it with the SPOLL command. My challenge for May is to get them talking to each other - an interesting exercise. Let's see how I go! Gotta learn about HP-Basic, HP-IB and the multiprogrammer!