HP 9000 Series 300

[Gary C]

Just got a load of HP9000 series 300's from work

Complete with some monitors, keyboards, mice and hard drives (about 30 in all !). The hard drives are largely scrap as they were replaced with new units as they failed and as it seems HP in their wisdom not only used the GBIP interface for its disk drive (just like a PET !), it also put hard disks with a custom HP interface inside these boxes. Fortunately after buying what looks like the worlds stock of 9153B units, they switched to Bering EconoPak boxes that sensibly use SCSI drives and all of these still work (and have bigger disks)

Fired them up, and one even has the 68030 with the 68882 copro

 

[Gary C]

Bought a TNT4882 GPIB PCI interface card and put it in the imaging library machine and have installed HPdir and HPdisk from here https://www.hp9845.net/9845/projects/hpdir/. Fantastic bit of software that allows me to connect the drives upto the PC and image the disk without having to mess around with floppies.
One issue, we are using windows 10 which is a pain as its blocking the driver. I have to turn off driver signing on boot every time I want to use it.

 

[Gary C]

Bit of history, the machines were installed where I work to monitor the vibrations in an AGR fuel channel (ie, in a nuclear reactor). As the gas flows up the channel, it exits through a flow control device called a gag. It was thought that if this became unstable it could vibrate, fail and block the fuel channel. This system used a spectrum analyser controlled by these machines to detect this vibration and raise an alarm in the main control room.
I remember the system from 1988 when I started working and I never thought I would one day take it home

Software though, remains on site on pain of being shot

 

[commodorejohn]

Need to figure out a storage solution for my 330 sometime...picked it up in a surplus-electronics shop some years back and it boots fine, but I have no GPIB devices, and compatible SCSI controllers seem to be pretty nearly unobtainium...

 

[Eudimorphodon]

Fortunately after buying what looks like the worlds stock of 9153B units, they switched to Bering EconoPak boxes that sensibly use SCSI drives and all of these still work (and have bigger disks)

Oooh, SCSI. Don't forget to use the Tully Toggle!

(Yeah, yeah, that's an HP 200 series, not a 300, but still...)

So what are you going to actually *do* with them? Perhaps the only time I've ever seen a 3000 in the flesh was, oddly, in a server rack circa 2005, in a machine room belonging to (insert large mall retailer here, probably shouldn't say who); we were touring the building before taking it over, and they had a bunch of weird legacy stuff in that basement. Was kind of disappointed they didn't leave any of it behind. Would love to know if they were still actually using it for something.

 

[GrizzlyAdams]

IIRC the 9133 and 9153 have Nighthawk drives and tend to have a failure that can be fixed (I'll have to check with the guys I know that collect them and have repaired around a dozen of them). The 7959-7963 use an ESDI drive paired with a HPIB controller, it seems those tend to die due to mechanical failures.

The 300 series are nice machines, both for running HP-UX and HP Basic. You can even netboot them from lansrm running on a modern *nix host if you have a 98643 ethernet card or the equivalent embedded on the processor board. I'm currently building a replacement video card for my HP9836C (aka HP 9000 236C) with VGA & HDMI output in addition to supporting the native monitor of the system. Previously I built some 7.5MB RAM expansions for the 200 series machines.

 

[GrizzlyAdams]

Incidentally, there is a chance the 9836 / 9000 236 in that video might be one of the ones I picked up at a local prop house in January.

 

[Gary C]

I want to have one of the 9000/300's set up with its Spectrum Analyser running a simulacrum of the software it ran when monitoring our reactors. It draws a picture of the core and fills in each fuel channel as it checks it. Not massively exciting but another display item of interest, especially with its nuclear connection.

The one with the 68030 I will probably want to put HPUX on it. It also has a colour graphics card that I found in a box and the colour monitor but I need to find the installation manual (a hp98549)

 

[Martin Hepperle]

9133 and the like drives use Seagate hard disks. These are easy to replace by hard disks or MFM emulators.
The 9153/54 is more cumbersome / impossible to repair because it used its own HP designed interface and encoding scheme. These "Nighthawk" disk were prone to failure and HP later discontinued the production. For example the HP Vectra PC came with these drives and HP later changed the production line to use a Seagate controller and drives.
Maybe someone wants to tackle building an emulator for these disk systems? There seem to be no technical details available for the interface, though.
For HP-UX systems a SCSI disk is the best solution, instead of a real disk drive one can also use BlueSCSI and similar replacements.

 

[Gary C]

Well thats odd.

In the pile I found a colour graphics card in a box, and a colour monitor. Weyhey but no, the graphics card is a HP 98549 which seems to put out 1024 x 768 and the monitor is a HP 35471 which only supports 600 x 400
How odd

Need to find a synch on green monitor now but its a shame I cant use a HP monitor in colour.