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HP 9825 Projects

hp9825.com

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Incidentally, CuriousMarc (Jean-Marc Verdiell) is currently deep into his 9825 repair-a-thon. An incredible window into the technology of that time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-eN93L6yX8&list=PL-_93BVApb...

Came here to make this comment (even though expected it will be already there :) ), the moment i read the post. One of the best channels on youtube.

I'm sure this post exists on HN because of the latest video in that series. The site linked by this post is mentioned by name.

I don't know the precise history, but the corporate decision to work on these self contained computers was the reason why Steve Wozniak left HP to found Apple Computer with Steve Jobs.

Still, paging through Byte Magazine and looking at all of the things that I couldn't afford at the time, the HP computers definitely seemed pretty cool to me, and I'm sure the quality of HP calculators lent to the appeal.

Funny enough, I think those things were never meant to be a "personal" computer. You could get quite a sophisticated external bus system for these ("field bus" I think) and that made them ideal for lab environments.

Did you mean GPIB?

This is a predecessor of the computer that I most crave, the HP-87:

http://www.oldcomputers.net/hp85.html

(I wanted the HP-87 since before the Series 80 became the standard issue computer in the great Brutalist&retro ambiance of the video game Control. I would be sure to get a HP-87 without any supernatural phenomena.)

In 1980, I lived in Nanjing China, working at Purple Mountain Observatory, collaborating on understanding the rings of Uranus using occultation data. I brought along an HP-85 and it was just the thing for this kind of work: robust, reliable, easy to use, and capable. A full desktop computer, programmable in Basic. Other astronomers at the observatory used it for analysis of polar wandering and sunspot physics.

Still have the beast in my attic -- I wonder it'll run after 40+ years?

That's a well-traveled HP 85.

If you decide to play with it, appears there's a community around them, including someone who made new ROM carrier PCBs.

Before powering it up, I don't know whether there's anything worth checking first (tin whiskers? flux capacitor?), but the community might?

"Stretch it to the limit and you'll see what I mean - perhaps by the year 1999 all the software ever written will run in less than a minute."

Ouch. Right in the feels.

I think for me it would probably be a Commodore 'Super Pet'..

What was it? like 5 languages in ROM? And a real monitor - not a wimpy lil 3" one like the kaypro's and osbornes had either! Back in my vic-20/c64 days, that sounded like pure luxury :-D

I finished one other project - playing "MasterMind" against the computer (you know, where you have to guess five colour pins) with output done on the internal little printer. After that I had started one one other project (an 8085 assembly language simulator), when first the controller for the external 8'' floppy drive stopped working, effectively bricking it, and shortly after that the handful of tape cartridges I had. Mind you, at the time everything was 15 years old or so, so I couldn't really blame the equipment.

I used one of those big machines (not this one) back in the day. But, for my money, the most beautiful calculator in history was the HP25 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-25). Clear keys, spaced for errorless entry, and with that wonderful levering action that made it unnecessary to look up at the display to see if you entered the number correctly. The key colours, sublime. And the back, shaped to perfection.

A pinnacle of design.

I wished they would have some hints regarding the applications of this "third generation desktop computer". Those things had 32KiB of RAM -- what were they using that for? Some felt even the need for a 32KiB RAM expansion. Clearly those were not used as desktop calculators, but what were they doing?

I once (1992?) calculated mandelbrot sets on one of these. 400x400, output to an external thermo printer as the one-line display had, well, only one line. With a calculation depth of 256 it took about 48 hours to produce one set.

Love the disclaimer at the bottom, "and don’t let nobody tell you different!"

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