HP 150 Touchscreen

[Ruud]

Since yesterday I'm the owner of this machine as displayed in the HP museum with the exception of the holder (?) between the dual disk drive and the computer. FYI, the actual computer and CRT are one unit.

My first question: are there any other owners of this machine around on this forum?

I got it with a lots of documentation that I want to scan. It also came with a lot of floppies that I want to make images of. I just unpacked all and haven't even thought about putting one in one of my older PCs. But I noticed one thing, the ones I saw said they were single-side! But we are talking about 720 KB ones and that baffled me a bit. If anybody knows how to deal with them, please inform me. TIA!

 

[Brian Todd]

Hi Ruud, looks like a great acquisition! I don't own the machine but love old HP computers (I personally have a portable and a portable plus). Looking to Wikipedia, it suggests that there were a number of HP floppy drives supported by the HP 150, some of which are indeed 270kB single sided. Its maybe worth checking which model of floppy you have with your rig. Would be great to see some pics too

 

[krebizfan]

Not 720K but 270K formats for most of the 3.5" drives with the HP-150. Some of those drives were made before the automatic shutter system was invented so it could be necessary to remove the shutter from a disk to prevent damage to the drive. That concludes my limited knowledge.

There was a tool (HP110.SYS) that permits an IBM PC compatible to read the HP format. https://www.hpmuseum.org/forum/thread-15979.html might be a starting primer.

 

[Brian Todd]

Not 720K but 270K formats for most of the 3.5" drives with the HP-150. Some of those drives were made before the automatic shutter system was invented so it could be necessary to remove the shutter from a disk to prevent damage to the drive. That concludes my limited knowledge.

There was a tool (HP110.SYS) that permits an IBM PC compatible to read the HP format. https://www.hpmuseum.org/forum/thread-15979.html might be a starting primer.

And the credit for HP110.SYS goes to Chuck who wrote it! I have used it successfully for my HP Portable as this also uses the HP format.

 

[SomeGuy]

If you wish to make sector images of the disks, be aware that they have a very odd format. Most HP 3.5" disks like these are formatted single sided, double density, 70 tracks, with 256 byte sectors and an extra 128 byte sector on the end of each track.

The only DOS imaging program that I know of that can fully handle differing sector sizes on the same track is Teledisk. Otherwise, you will need a flux-level dumping device such as a Kryoflux, SuperCard Pro, or Greaseweazle. Although, the 128 byte sectors supposedly aren't used for anything and can be omitted.

 

[Martin Hepperle]

I also have an HP 150 but normally use it with either a 9133 hard disk drive or an HPDRIVE emulator running on an older Windows PC with PCI slot for the HP-IB card.
It is a cute little computer with HP-IB, terminal emulation and graphics capabilities through its AGIOS BIOS extension.
Not the fastest machine, but quite complete. Like a few other early "PC"s it is MS-DOS compatible but not IBM-PC compatible.

HP museum has quite a lot of software for it - you might want to crosscheck with their web site before creating images of already archived software.
I found that the Wordstar version on the HP Museum web site is not properly working for the HP 150 - if you have a copy of Wordstar for the HP 150, it would be worth to create a copy.

HP disks use 256 byte sectors and the 128 byte sector mentioned above is not part of the HP format. It is usually an artifact from using the same floppy disk on anonther MS-Dos system with 512 byte sectors. The HP format would then leave a gap, which tools like Teledisk read as a valid sector of 128 bytes.

Teledisk is still a useful tool to archive those disks and the resulting image can be copied back to floppy disks or it can be converted to a raw, sequential image file (omitting the bogus 128 byte sector, if it exists).
However, it requires an older PC - I use it on a Pentium 200 MHz with Windows 98 and 5-1/4 and 3-1/2" floppy disk drives.

 

[Ruud]

Thank you for all the comments!

 

[Chuck(G)]

Look around in SIMTEL20 for a file called HP150SYS or the like--I made PC DOS device drivers to handle both the original HP150 and the Model II--back in the day.

 

[huion]

Since yesterday I'm the owner of this machine as displayed in the HP museum with the exception of the holder (?) between the dual disk drive and the computer. FYI, the actual computer and CRT are one unit.

My first question: are there any other owners of this machine around on this forum?

I got it with a lots of documentation that I want to scan. It also came with a lot of floppies that I want to make images of. I just unpacked all and haven't even thought about putting one in one of my older PCs. But I noticed one thing, the ones I saw said they were single-side! But we are talking about 720 KB ones and that baffled me a bit. If anybody knows how to deal with them, please inform me. TIA!

have you made images of the floppy disks or found a place where i can get software i got a hp-150 but it came with no software

 

[mloewen]

have you made images of the floppy disks or found a place where i can get software i got a hp-150 but it came with no software

HP Computer Museum

The museum of HP computers is a collection of HP computing products introduced between 1966 and 1991. The museum contains: calculators, desktop computers, computer systems, tape drives, disc drives, plotters, printers, digitizers and other hardware as well as software, documentation and...

www.hpmuseum.net

 

[Ruud]

have you made images of the floppy disks or found a place where i can get software i got a hp-150 but it came with no software

No, I haven't for the simple reason I had no idea how to do it. And in the mean time I sold the machine.

 

[syzygy]

This is a coincidence and I am taking advantage of it to ask an unrelated question.

I was looking through some of my archived files and happened to be looking at HP15S101.ZIP which contains HP150.sys which is mentioned here (I did a search to try to figure out why I downloaded it way back when) and I am attaching the zip.

My questions concerns the EDN BBS that I downloaded the file from back in ~1991. I know that EDN magazine still exists, does anyone know if there is a repository of their BBS anywhere? Even a collection of teir old design ideas would be cool because I used to like reading them.