smp
Veteran Member
Hello again, all,
Now that I am fully involved with my "new" HP-86B, I am looking to add reliable mass storage (floppy disks) to it so I can then move on to plugging in my HP-82900A Auxiliary Processor, and boot up CP/M.
I also have an HP-9121D 3.5 inch floppy disk unit that I have been able to get one of the floppy drives going, but a couple of times now, when I put the shield back onto the drive and screw it down into the chassis again, it stops working, causing me to undo it all and get it going again. In short, this is not working out to be as reliable unit as I originally thought. The main electronics board seems to be perfectly solid (my usual experience with vintage HP electronics) but the disk drives are electro-mechanical mechanisms, and they seem to be much more flaky after circa 25 years of storage somewhere.
So, I came across a very interesting web site called the HP Drive Project (a subset of a larger site called the HP 9845 Project): http://www.hp9845.net/9845/projects/hpdrive/
This looks like an interesting thing to try - running a program called HP Drive in an old PC with an HP-IB interface card, that emulates an HP disk drive of one sort or another.
The one stumbling block that I have is that I am not a PC kind of guy. Yes, I have used PCs all along for the past 25 years at my places of work, but I have been a Macintosh guy since 1985, and know very little about the inner workings of the PC and all the clones.
So, does anyone out there have any experience with building up an HP Drive? I would greatly appreciate any advice that I can get on what pieces and parts to go out and hunt around for.
I found that eBay has a wide variety of available HP-IB/GP-IB interface cards available. Here is one of the more reasonably priced ones that matches up with what the HP Drive site indicates will work:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/14068757334...AX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1423.l2649#ht_1092wt_744
It appears that this card needs to plug into a PC with an available ISA slot.
Now, keeping in mind that I want to do little more than get a PC configured as an HP Drive, all I think that I need is an older PC capable of running Windows 98. One or two floppy disk drives, a small hard disk, and the ability to connect to the internet in order to download the HP Drive software and drivers, and HP disk images should be all that I need - right?
Obviously, I'd love to purchase a good working PC for less than $100, and purchase a good working HP-IB interface card, fire it up, jump onto the web site, download the software and drivers, and get into the adventure of making this all work together. However, I would really like to avoid going straight down the rabbit hole of non-working PC hardware, incompatibilities, etc.
I would greatly appreciate any advice and pointers that you may be able to offer me.
Thanks very much, in advance, for your patience and attention!
smp
Now that I am fully involved with my "new" HP-86B, I am looking to add reliable mass storage (floppy disks) to it so I can then move on to plugging in my HP-82900A Auxiliary Processor, and boot up CP/M.
I also have an HP-9121D 3.5 inch floppy disk unit that I have been able to get one of the floppy drives going, but a couple of times now, when I put the shield back onto the drive and screw it down into the chassis again, it stops working, causing me to undo it all and get it going again. In short, this is not working out to be as reliable unit as I originally thought. The main electronics board seems to be perfectly solid (my usual experience with vintage HP electronics) but the disk drives are electro-mechanical mechanisms, and they seem to be much more flaky after circa 25 years of storage somewhere.
So, I came across a very interesting web site called the HP Drive Project (a subset of a larger site called the HP 9845 Project): http://www.hp9845.net/9845/projects/hpdrive/
This looks like an interesting thing to try - running a program called HP Drive in an old PC with an HP-IB interface card, that emulates an HP disk drive of one sort or another.
The one stumbling block that I have is that I am not a PC kind of guy. Yes, I have used PCs all along for the past 25 years at my places of work, but I have been a Macintosh guy since 1985, and know very little about the inner workings of the PC and all the clones.
So, does anyone out there have any experience with building up an HP Drive? I would greatly appreciate any advice that I can get on what pieces and parts to go out and hunt around for.
I found that eBay has a wide variety of available HP-IB/GP-IB interface cards available. Here is one of the more reasonably priced ones that matches up with what the HP Drive site indicates will work:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/14068757334...AX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1423.l2649#ht_1092wt_744
It appears that this card needs to plug into a PC with an available ISA slot.
Now, keeping in mind that I want to do little more than get a PC configured as an HP Drive, all I think that I need is an older PC capable of running Windows 98. One or two floppy disk drives, a small hard disk, and the ability to connect to the internet in order to download the HP Drive software and drivers, and HP disk images should be all that I need - right?
Obviously, I'd love to purchase a good working PC for less than $100, and purchase a good working HP-IB interface card, fire it up, jump onto the web site, download the software and drivers, and get into the adventure of making this all work together. However, I would really like to avoid going straight down the rabbit hole of non-working PC hardware, incompatibilities, etc.
I would greatly appreciate any advice and pointers that you may be able to offer me.
Thanks very much, in advance, for your patience and attention!
smp