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HP 9000 Series 300

Gary C

Gary C

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Joined
May 26, 2018
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Location
Lancashire, UK
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 :)
 
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.
 
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 :)
 
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...
 
Gary C said:
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)
Click to expand...

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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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)
 
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.
 
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.
 
Got a Dell monitor who's VGA input does Sync on Green :)

With HPdrive I have mounted HP-UX using file HP-UX7.0FullSys_7958B.hpi and the machine boots to Unix but I want to stick this on the real dis drive and not sure how to do this yet :)
 
HP-UX comes with the text based GUI tool "SAM" (System Administration Manager) for setting up the system including disks.
You should be able to configure interfaces and format your disk using SAM.
There is, for example, the "HP-UX - Installing Peripherals - HP 9000 Series 300/400" manual, which could be helpful.

Martin
 
Ah, so boot from PC with disk drive attached on a different address, then use SAM to set it up and install ?
 
... yes, you can have many disks at the same time. That's how I bootstrapped a SCSI drive, starting with a system on a HPDRIVE simulator and the adding the external the SCSI drive. The same should be doable with HP-IB drives - each at a different address, of course, but on the same interface.
For higher performance you can also use multiple HP-IB interfaces, there is even a high-speed HP-IB interface board for disks.

Martin
 
Martin Hepperle said:
... yes, you can have many disks at the same time. That's how I bootstrapped a SCSI drive, starting with a system on a HPDRIVE simulator and the adding the external the SCSI drive. The same should be doable with HP-IB drives - each at a different address, of course, but on the same interface.
Click to expand...
The machine is something I have 'used' for nearly 30 years but it ran a monitoring system and interaction was limited to rebooting it when it needed it.
Martin Hepperle said:
For higher performance you can also use multiple HP-IB interfaces, there is even a high-speed HP-IB interface board for disks.

Martin
Click to expand...

Ah, yes. I have a GPIB board labelled specifically for disk drives in one of the machines, shame none have the SCSI interface.

I did wonder if the Bering econopac boxes that I have, which are internally SCSI would take a CDROM...
 
With HPdrive running I can start the boot process into HP-UX 7 from the boot tape image but it locks up at allocating memory after

avail mem = 212992
lockable mem = 110592

Hum.

Have a few memory boards, so might try swapping them around.
 
Found another image called full7958.hpi which I have mounted on HPDrive (what an excellent product that is) and it boots to desktop and I can log in as root.

This should mean I can copy it to a drive using HPDir I believe.

But boy, even with a 68030 its slooooow

Using HPDir gave the command

HPDir - recover
Please specify source <msus>: Full7958.hpi (this one confused me for a while as it didn't seem to want a file name, just an address)
Please specify target <msus>: 700:

and off it went,

Just booting from the new image from the new drive and backing up the second one with the Basic system image.

Notably the full image was taken from a machine that was apparently 'NOT PROPERLY SHUTDOWN', now thats me told.
 
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