|
PureBytes Links
Trading Reference Links
|
> on a quiet day like today it may be fitting to remember the first
> personal computers some of us used. I was reminded of mine
> yesterday when I hit upon www.hpmuseum.org, featuring the HP-65,
> the first hand-held programmable calculator, which I remember I
> bought around 1976.
Heh. Allow me to expand on that...
The HP-35 was the first HP handheld, and it was a revolution in a
time when people were still excited about 4-function (+-*/)
calculators. It did logs, trig, arctan/arcsin/arccos, etc.
I saw a brochure for the HP-45 as a senior in high school in 1974,
and fell in love. I couldn't afford it so I bought a TI SR-50 when I
went to university. It did the job OK, but it wasn't love. A few
years later I bought a used HP-45, a fabulous calculator that I still
have, but I never use it any more. I still think in RPN and have an
HP-12C for day-to-day use.
I used the HP-65 in a college class in 1974. Quite the beastie. I
was seriously impressed that an honest-to-God computer could fit into
your pocket. (Still am, given the technology of the day.)
> A few years later, after a brief encounter with a Commodore PET
> (quite unreliable), I bought my beloved HP-85, a desktop computer
> boasting 32K of memory, magnetic cartridges as storage media, and
> HP BASIC as the built-in language... After that came HP's
> "Integral-PC", the first portable UNIX PC with a plasma display and
> a built-in printer.
By that time I was working for HP in Fort Collins, CO (where I still
live), with some of the people who made the 98xx series of "desktop
calculators." This was before the HP-85 came out, but I used other
HP BASIC workstations a LOT -- e.g. the 9845. I worked on the
successor to the 9845, the HP9000 series 500, which was originally
envisioned as a higher-performance box for the same price. It was an
amazing product: the first 32bit CPU-on-a-chip (this was in 1980),
multi-processor support (just turn off the box, plug in a new CPU
board, power it up, and the system automatically scheduled multiple
BASIC sessions and OS daemons on all processors), run-time BASIC
compiler (no interpreter, though it looked like it -- BASIC commands
were compiled on the fly, and in a loop you only had to pay the
compilation cost on the first pass), simple-to-use 3D graphics
libraries, database utilities, etc etc etc.
"Rocky Mountain BASIC" is still just about the most productive
programming environment I've ever seen. You could whip out extremely
complex programs in a remarkably short time. I always claimed that
the s500 flavor of Rocky Mountain BASIC was "the *ultimate* BASIC
that would ever exist." I couldn't imagine anyone using BASIC as the
basis for anything larger. I didn't forsee Visual BASIC. :-)
Unfortunately the market had changed and the 9845 price point was now
too expensive. The HP9000 series 200, a Motorola 68k-based BASIC
system developed in parallel with the s500, pushed the s500 out of
the market.
Meanwhile, in 1981, I and a few other radicals had convinced our lab
manager to check out this Unix thing. We ended up ripping the BASIC
personality off the s500 and bolting a Unix personality onto it.
That became the first HP-UX, and it gained all the OS features (e.g.
multi-CPU support) of the BASIC workstation.
The Unix idea started to spread, and they put a native Unix onto the
s200. There were several incarnations of the s200 system, and one of
them was to put the s200 guts and Unix OS into the Integral package
you liked so much. Cute box, but it never went anywhere.
> One reason may lie in the fact that Hewlett-Packard, in those days,
> was a company fanatically dedicated to near-perfect quality, and
> it showed!
Yup. No longer, though. The Bill and Dave ethos has disappeared
from HP in many different ways.
> My apologies for this off-topic post. Won't let it happen again.
Ya right. :-) Hope you enjoyed my little trip down memory lane!
Gary
|