Subject: Re: HP 9121

From: Joe <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed Jun 11 21:11:01 2003

Lee,

   I'm posting a copy of this on the CC list as well as replying directly
to you since this is of interest to several of the list members.

At 11:20 PM 6/11/03 +0100, you wrote:
>Hello Joe,
>
>> I missed the first part of this thread but if you're talking about HP
>> 9121 disk drives ...
>
>We were. I dragged one out of a dumpster on Sunday. 

  Oh. I did see your message about that.

As far as I can see
>the only thing wrong is a crack in the case top where someone stood on
>it.

   I just tossed a complete but GRUNGY 9121 in the trash. If you want the
case let me know before the trashman gets here and I'll rescue it for you.
It was FILTHY. The outside cleaned up pretty well but bugs had been living
inside and it was full of dirt and debris. I took it apart and tried to
clean it up but finally gave up in disgust. The drives were packed full of
crud. I cleaned them as best as I could without going through a complete
rebuild. One drive seems to work but the head wouldn't seek on the other
and it's pulling too much current. Both had gobs of stuff wound up on the
lead screw and that may be what's jamming it. I spent several hours working
on the thing and finally decided that it just wasn't worth the trouble so I
tossed the whole mess.

>
>> What kind of docs are you looking for?
>
>I'm looking for the Amigo and/or SS/80 protocoll docs so I can roll my
>own code to drive the HP 9121 from a PC using an HP-IB card. I just
>want to test the thing, it would be nice if it works.

   Well you're in the right place at the right time. We were discussing
these protocalls on the list a few weeks ago. Peter Brown asked some
questions some of the protocalls and that's what started that entire
discussion. Frank McConnel scanned and posted one of the protocalls on a
web site. Contact him and ask about the address. I THINK it was the SS-80
protocall.  Peter is working on a program to read CS-80 disks on a PC via a
GPIB card and he has a working version of it. He's sent me a copy but I
have to set up a W'98 machine to run it on. I think Peter wants to add
Amigo and SS-80 support in addition to the CS-80. ALSO FWIW several of us
including Steve Robertson have been playing around with the old HP 1000
computers and are writing our own operating system for it. Steve has
written a driver for the CS-80 hard drives and has it working (crude but
workable he says).

   Also I've been playing around with the old HP LIF Utilities. LIF stands
for Logical Interchange Format and was widely used by HP for some of their
early disk drives. LIF is a real simple format and it's also like the old
tape format. HP has now placed the LIF Utils in the public domain and you
can download them from HP for free. The utils are supposed to alow you to
read, write, initialize and format LIF disks on a PC but the other day I
noticed that it also said that it would support LIF disk drives connected
to a PC via a HP-IB card so I decided to try it. I've played with that a
little but I haven't been able to get it to work. I posted a question about
it on the list a couple of days ago but didn't get any responses. I got the
PC to recognize the drive but it keep saying that the disk was
incompatible. I used THE SAME drive and disk with a HP-85 so I know they're
compatible. I don't think the HP-85 writes a LIF format so I can understand
why the PC couldn't read the disk but I should have been able to format and
initialize it but couldn't so there's something else going on. I was using
a National Instruments GP_IB card and that might be the problem but the
utils recognized it and didn't complain about it so I don't know for sure.
I some HP HP_IB cards so I'll have to install one, find the drivers for it
and see if that's the problem but that's going to take some time too.

  I've got several projects cooking right now that take priority but when I
get time I'm dabbing around with trying to interchange files between the
HP-85, 9000 200s and a PC. I've done some work on it but at the moment I'm
mostly just gathering up drives, systems and SW to try out. When I get
everything I'll sit down and do some serious research. FWIW I can read a
disk written by a HP-85 on a 82901 disk drive in a PC drive using LIF but
the programs are stored in a tokenized format so it comes out as mostly
garbage. There's no option on a 85 to save the program files in an ASCII
format but there is one in the HP 9000 200s so I should be able to trasnfer
files between the 9000 200s and a PC via sneaker net. One the things that
I'm going to try is to read a tokenized HP-85 file into a 9000 200 (or
something else like an Integral PC) and then resave it in an ASCII format
so that it can be transferred to a PC.

   So there you go. Lots of avenues to pursue! Let me know what you come up
with.

>
>Then I'll have to get an HP computer.

    Good! Go to it.  A LOT of HP computers support that HP 9121 drive. The
HP 85*, 86, 87 or any of the HP 9000 200 or 300 series. I'm sure that many
of the newer 9000 series also support it but I'm not familar enough with
them to tell you which ones.

   * The original HP-85 needs a Mass Storage ROM but the 85B has it built
in. I think all the 86s and 87s have it built in.

     Joe