HP 110 and HP Portable Plus Software and ROMs - survey

[Martin Hepperle]

Several software products had been available for the HP 110 and the HP Portable Plus.
Some of them came on floppy disks and some in (EP)ROMs.

A few are available for example on hpmuseum.net or on www.jeffcalc.hp41.eu.

However, there are still many programs missing. While many generic MS-DOS programs run on the portables (and the HP 150) all programs which directly access hardware cannot be used.
Therefore, HP and some software vendors adapted some software packages (for example GWBASIC, or Microsoft Word 1.1) to the hardware of the HP portable computers (which ran MS-DOS 2.11, but were not IBM-PC compatible).

So: could those of you, who own a HP 110 or a Portable Plus check their inventory for any software which is not yet available?

For example Microsoft Word 1.10 must exist somewhere in form of two (H/L) ROMs for the Portable Plus and alternatively as two floppy disks for the the Portable Plus.

[There is a version of Word 1.1 for the HP 150 desktop computer on hpmuseum.net but this is not suited for the hardware of the portables. They also have the "Utilities" disk for this software, but not the HP 110 program disk.]

Besides HP and OEMs there was also the company "Personalized Software" which provided excellent support, soft and hardware for these machines. They also provided 3rd party software on disks and in ROMs, which may have been installed in the Portable sitting on your shelf.

A typical Portable Plus would display the standard ROM software in his PAM screen:

• MS-DOS Commands
• Advance Mail
• Transfer Mail
• MemoMaker
• TimeManagement
• ExecutiveCardManager
• 123 Rel. 2.01
• HP Reflection
• VT Reflection
• HP Terminal
• VT Terminal

Any additional items may be in additional 3rd party ROMs. These would be interesting to image.

These might be interesting ROMs:

• MSWord
• Multimate
• Word Perfect

And on disks:

• Condor database

Martin

 

[PixelTheCat]

I just got a portable plus with MS-Word 1.1 in the ROM drawer. I'm new to these machines though.

What's the best way to get the data off?

 

[Martin Hepperle]

The best way is to pull the (EP)ROM and read it using an EPROM Reader.

An less preferable alternative would be to use a tool like DEBUG as part of a batch file to hex-dump the contents of the file to a file or the serial interface - but as the ROM is mapped to a virtual disk drive, this will not reproduce the exact content of the ROM, just the binary data of the program(s) and associated files. One would then have to recreate the ROM, which is possible with the original HP tools.

For more information about the Portables, look at Jeff's web site.

 

[PixelTheCat]

Looks like my reader/burner doesn't support this chip. Is this something I can shove in a breadboard and use a ton of wires to the reader to pretend to be a different chip ? I see references to adapter boards online (eg. https://github.com/barbeque/tc531000-tl866-adapter).

 

[PixelTheCat]

ooh, I remembered I have one of these: https://www.tindie.com/products/Oddblk/simple-eeprom-programmer-shield-for-arduino-mega/

I should be able to modify the sketch provided to read the ROMs. I can also pull Lotus 1-2-3 off my drawer.

I'm guessing that the bin file at https://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?sw=587 could be burned onto a suitable EPROM (or is there an EEPROM that'd work?). I can't find other ROM images other than the custom ones on jeffcalc's pages.

 

[Martin Hepperle]

Instead of rewiring the reader to read the Toshiba ROM it is probably easier to simple copy the MS-DOS files off the virtual ROM disk and transfer them to a modern system (via disk or with Kermit).

Then the content of the ROM could be recreated - not an exact bitwise copy of the original, but the functional result would be the same.

There are 28C010 EEPROMs, but these are not very common - I simply used UV-erasable EPROMs.