Subject: Re: HP 80 Series Software

From: "Peter Brown" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon Jun 2 10:30:01 2003

Hi All,

>  Yes a FEW of the HP-IB hard drives. The only drives that would work
>without specail support were the HP 9133/9134 that had a apecial option
>that made the disk look like three HP 9895 8" floppy dirves. There is a...
Sounds like it is a bit of a non-starter...

>  I replied to you several times but my messages don't appear to be
>getting through. I haven't had time to set up a machine with the HP-IB card
>and install your SW.
Let me know when you get things going, the software has gone through a 
number of revisions since the version I sent you.  I'm now looking at an 
application that first strips all the data from an HPIB disk drive dumping 
it onto a PC.  A second application on the PC then emulates an HPIB drive 
using groups of files stored in a simple directory system  on the PC.

>I've been spending a lot of time with the HP 1000s and
>with a HP-IB interfaced Speech Synthesizer that I found. (It's  COOL!)
Sounds like a pretty rare piece of kit - is it a commercial Speech 
Synthesizer or home-brew?

>That's taken me deeper into the HP-IB bus operation and I've had to repair
>a couple of HP 59401 HP-IB Bus Analyzers for use with that. (Anybody got a
>manual for these?)

I certainly have an operations manual, it may include some service bits and 
pieces.  I'll take a look when I get home to the UK.

I have a couple of these bus analysers at home, I used them in the initial 
investigations for the CS80 reader.  You can use them to slow down the bus 
traffic on an HPIB system either to 2 transactions a second or single step.  
I tried using one to investigate the traffic between a 9000 300 machine and 
a disk drive but as soon as you slow the bus down the 300 series machine 
complains that the disk has timess out.

Luckily I have an old HP 3562 spectrum analyser than interfaces to CS80 / 
AMIGO disks.  You can single step though commands with no timeout problems 
using it as the disk controller.

In the end though useful the 59401 is somewhat limited in what it can do.
With the long command sequences that I was examining I ended up having to 
write down each octal (Yes, OCTAL - the I lost count of the number of times 
that I accidentally read the numbers as hex....) data packet as it appeared 
on the bus and then go back and try to decode what it all meant.
The bus analyser also occasionally dropped the first byte of information 
being sent back by the HPIB disk drive.

I'm currently investigating another option.
NI make a GPIB+ card (ISA or PCI) that acts as both a GPIB controller and a 
GPIB analyser.  In theory this can be set up to 'sniff' the GPIB bus and 
generate a log file of each GPIB bus event (with a 50 ns time resolution).  
The log can be as long as you want so no more laboriously copying down octal 
codes.  I'll let you know how I get on.

>  I'm still looking for those blankity-blank manuals! Don't know where I
>put them. I found a set of paper back manauls of the same thing.
I don't need the manuals straight away.  I'm hoping they contain some info 
about HP-UX file formats (and general HP-UX stuff - I have no experience 
with HP-UX systems)

>Did the other manuals arrive yet?
I haven't seen them yet but it's a few days since anyone checked my mail for 
me.

Cheers

Peter Brown

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From: Joe <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon Jun 2 17:45:01 2003

>Sounds like it is a bit of a non-starter...

    I think so.

>pieces.  I'll take a look when I get home to the UK.

   I'd like get a copy if you have it. I'm running into a couple of
oddities when I try to operate it. It's working but not the way that I
expected and I don't know if I'm doing something wrong or what.

>complains that the disk has timess out.

    Steve Robertson ran into the same problem when he tried to use it to
study the disk operation as part of writing an OS for the HP 1000. He did
get some usefull info but only 32 bytes of it!

>codes.  I'll let you know how I get on.

   I have (had?) a card like that but NI no longer supports it and I
haven't been able to find any docs or software for it.

   I have something else that might be usefull. It's Bus Analyzer module
made by HP that works with one of their logic analyzers. You plug the LA
pods directly into it (no wire leads) and it has sockets for RS-232, HP-IB
and one or two other standard interfaces. With it you can use a LA to grab
the data, disaasemble it (if you have the the disassembler), save it, send
it to a computer, etc. I've never tried to use it since I don't have the LA
(HP 1631 IIRC) that it works with.

    Joe