Subject: I got a HP9000 - now what?

From: John Rollins <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon Jun 30 16:48:00 2003

I picked up this huge HP box with half the case(plastics anyway) 
missing... I picked it up because it had a DomainRing card and other 
Apollo-like ports. I finally figured out it's an HP9000, but I'm not 
sure which one yet. The board is labeled A1421-66538. It has a 25MHz 
68040 CPU. The HP-IL keyboard port is a neat touch. Does this thing 
use a normal VGA monitor? Looks like this one has a tape drive(DC600 
tapes like my Apollos?), and two hard drives - one is a freaking big 
5.25" FH like my Apollos, the other is HP SureStorageDisk 1000S+ 3.5" 
drive. I see 4 ISA slots, one has a DomainRing card. Will the other 
Apollo cards work there too? Any pointers to good HP9000 info(I'm 
still recovering from hauling this huge box in to do much searching 
right now - this thing is bigger and heavier than the Apollos! LOL, I 
though nothing could get bigger...)

I think my iMac is intimidated by this huge box towering over it on 
the desk now...

-- 

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|  KD7BCY      [email-masked]          |
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From: Jochen Kunz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue Jul 1 03:54:00 2003

On 2003.06.30 23:43 John Rollins wrote:

> I picked it up because it had a DomainRing card and other 
> 68040 CPU. 
Sounds like a HP9000 425s. (or 425e?) You can run Domain OS, HP-UX,
4.4BSD-Lite und NetBSD on it. (Maybe OpenBSD too.) I have 4.4BSD-Lite on
my 433t. 

> The HP-IL keyboard port is a neat touch.
You need a Domain keyboard for Domain OS and a HIL keyboard for the
other systems. You can switch the boot ROM from Domain to HP-UX mode in
the config menu...

> Does this thing use a normal VGA monitor? 
Depends on the video card and VGA monitor. I don't know the 425s, but it
schuold use a DIO framebuffer like my 433t. I have seen mono
framebuffers with a SubD 9 and color framebuffers with 3 BNC connectors.
You will need a multisync VGA monitor that is able to do sync on green
and a BNC - SubD 15 cable. 

> Any pointers to good HP9000 info
I found some hints and links on the NetBSD/hp300 page. 
-- 

tschüß,
       Jochen

Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/