Thank you for this great series / playlist

Cool video.

These were sold in Sydney (Emona Electronics, Haymarket) (+ probably many other cities) around 1983/84. I recall that there was a glossy double sided fold out brochure showing off the keyboard, system unit and a matching slimline dual drive unit that sat on top of the system unit and matched perfectly. A very nice system indeed. Apple II+ compatible with 64k usually. A matching amber phosphor monitor. Keyboards imported for sale in Australia did not have the Chinese characters. Early batches had the key legends printed on the keys and wore off after some use. The dealer I knew took the keyboards before sale, masked and sprayed the keycaps with a clear laquer to prevent this from occurring.

Not sure if you can answer, but I just received one of these as a gift for nostalgia. It turns on, the lights come on, the top light blinks, but that’s it. No startup sequence or anything. I tried several tapes, but it’s just not working. Any idea how to fix it? Thanks. ☺️

I had a heck of a time with this getting that dang back plate back on!!!! At about 31:40. Get about 8 of those spring loaded finger clamps and place then to the right of the metal tabs to hold the plate down. Like you said place that black colored lip against the edge of a table/bench what ever. Then GENTLY tap the right edge of that bottom plate with a small hammer. It does help to have a second person to either hold the assembly or do the tapping.

Thanks for a great set of videos on the HP calculators

Would it work if you applied the flux to the wick instead of the components?

jesus

I have both those boards. put the latest bios on them , and you will have some good overclocking boards.

kzbin.info/www/bejne/b3WxZI2PmJ1pj8ksi=KtZ-ODIV5y9EB2tL to upgrade the bios on the Asus board

I had one of these 440bx gigabyte boards back in the day, and I remember that when I switched to a P3 800, it involved setting the dip switches on the board in a way that was not listed in the manual. I only knew about how to set it because it was mentioned on an internet forum at the time. I previously had one of those Celeron 300A at 450, and to get that to work you had to tape off a couple of the pins on the CPU card.

I've actually inherited one of these. When I turn it on I see "error" on the screen - it's a bit of a vague message. Since I can see that when you turn yours on you see 0.00 I know it can't be that it expects a card to be loaded. Can it be the thermal paper not loaded properly or something like that?

They ought to have an HP-IL accessory with a built-in SD card reader. The SD cards are more reliable than magnetic cards and they are industry standard that can also be used in digital cameras.

😏👍 It's all about The Pentiums 🐢

My very first computer game! 😊

Were HP-67/97 cards copy protected?

Four years, and I just found this video. The System-80 was designed so that BASIC programs made for the TRS-80 would work on the System-80, but the minor hardware differences meant that it probably wouldn't run machine-code programs. I wonder if you know of the Dick Smith "Super-80" kit computer? It was a kit-built machine. It never really "took off" in a big way, but I bought one (which is sitting out in my garage). I even modified it a bit, and I got a copy of the machine code listing for TRS-80 BASIC and entered it into the Super-80 computer, then modified it to work with the Super-80 hardware. It worked, too. It was a lot better than the BASIC version which was made for the Super-80.

I wrote several large (...) applications on the HP-41 and HP-71B, e.g. a data acquisition application for the Swiss forest engineers, to collect information about tree health under a mandate from the Swiss government, to examine the claims that the forests were dying, which was very popular scaremongering from the Green Party, in the 1980s. I also wrote the PC application which handled the data collected with the HP-41. After several years of observation, the verdict was clear - the forests were perfectly healthy and growing much faster than expected (cf. all the studies about the "greening of the planet" published since then, including by NASA, as added CO2 really accelerates plant growth). On the HP-71, I wrote an application to calculate and plot profiles of high tension cable paths, with the pylons, obstacles, the cable distance to the ground (with the variations based on temperature, snow cover etc.) It all fit into 17KB of RAM. EOS (Energie Ouest Suisse) used it to plan a high tension cable between Lausanne and Yverdon, instead of software sold by Siemens for $200K. The application with the corresponding plots was published in the Swiss Engineering magazine in 1987, about 2 years after I completed it. I'm still laughing when I see how much memory most applications need, today, to do simple stuff 🤣

Hey, heck of a setup you got cooking down there! I have a syqyest lying around and a Supra...I dunno if I got the skillz to pull it off brother! Nice stuff!

2:39:14 Came for the intercepting, stayed for the cat.

The Commodore A2630 Processor board comes with 2 megs or 4 megs of memory installed. That GVP SCSI board, that you have installed, takes 1 meg 30-pin SIMMs. There appears to be 4 megs installed. So, there should be no conflict on the Zorro II bus. That high quality Chinon disk drive has the jumpers on the bottom of the PCB. So yes, the drive will have to be removed from the chassis to change the jumpers. 😃

Probably one of the best machines of the 90s

fantastic video thanks !!

Cyrix wasn't the best but still a important part of CPU history. I use to be that person that hated Cyrix (always been a AMD fan) but now I have been collecting the CPUs. Fastest Cyrix MII I have currently is the PR400. I would love to find the PR433(I know I can just bump up the FSB from 95 to 100 and get the same results) to add to my collection. Thanks for the video.

Nice vintage system. May I ask what CPU you are running?

Lucky sod... An Hercules card, a six pack and it's boots without issues. 😊

hi

i am glad to watch this video. actually, I have been used it since I was kid. I live in taiwan. when I used it. this product is tragic. this computer's power supply has a little problem. it made me to repair for many times when I was kid. after many years , I purchased it once from ebay. I still repair it for several times. and now, I change new psu and add ups.it is very stable when I boot it. I must say. I feel so bad with acer. but I must use acer monitor. because this brand support 15K for my apple II gs and low price.

This is awesome. I grew up playing Half life and CS 1.6 with my brothers at LAN parties back in the day. Great memories

Retrospective, I loved this video so much, I had to hit the like button!

dang, id never expect such video to appear in reccomendeds tho i hope you get much more recognition!

The best 3 hours i have ever spent on youtube.

Have you seen Michael Wessel's PicoRAM 6116? It emulates the RAM and effectively replaces the need for the tape deck. And I had one of these, but I banished it to Oz, and is now in the care of The Clueless Engineer over in Port Macquarie. And if you ever see one pass through eBay, the E&L MT-80Z is a MPF-I on the right hand side (with a second Z80 board on the left hand side). The MT-80AZ is different though.

I know this is really old now, and you probably already figured this out, but just for the benefit of anyone passing by: the Fastload cartridge that TFW8B sells is the Fastload Reloaded, which has additional routines for dealing with the SD2IEC. I'm fairly sure that a normal Fastload cartridge will not work with SD2IEC, or at the very least it'll just load at the normal speed. There are other fastloaders that have been tweaked for the SD2IEC, I can't remember if the SNAPPY2020 (updated version of Super Snapshot 5) is one of them.

This VDrive is shown in Episode 104 of the Spectrum Show.

That was my dad's first console!

I had a C64c and the Diskdrive(in fact I still have them). for some reason the fastload cartridge totally past me by. no idea why I didn't get 1 back in the day.

Cool calculator! I have a Toshiba BC-1212 and I recently shot a video with it

Great video. My HP 35 battery pack, though, might as well have been glued/cemented shut. My thinnest spudger (like yours) is bent. Two spudgers later, a dangerous maneuver with a pocket knife got me in. The rest of the build went without a hitch, and no one died.

2:14 If you reformat these cartridges, are they usable again?

These machines were amazingly powerful for the time. Expensive too, but considering they were really Turing-complete computers with scientific functions built in and a whole application ecosystem, they were a bargain compared to your other options.

I was wondering why this was identified on the case as an "I/O calculator" and apparently the answer is that its key feature is its I/O lines for external device control. Which makes a lot of sense given HP's roots in electronic test equipment and laboratory devices. I remember using an HP gas chromatograph in the 1980s that was controlled by a little BASIC-programmable computer with print output--the industrial design was a bit like a later version of this device, but with a full QWERTY keyboard and a wider thermal printer for charting and other output.

I can smell this video! We had this case at our university! It was a blast to program it! It was real simple and clear from the manual.

TI calculators used similar magnetic cards and I remember thinking this was so futuristic when I saw the ads for them. I suppose it speaks to how tiny these programs were that this was even feasible with the magnetic tape of the time--you usually think of this kind of thing, on credit cards and farecards and such, as just storing a serial number that is an index to something else.

A MC button on the Casio would have made life easier. I wonder if, the sequence MR, M- might not have helped? I do not have such a simple (not complex) calculator to test it.

Man this thing is cool! You pull that thing out in Math class and people know you mean business!

Very good movie. I once tried to use hot air for old boards with through-hole assembly and it ended with the board delaminating (detaching the tracks with the solder mask from the rest of the board) at the point of heating. The paths are OK, but the separation remains. Therefore, the method you present here is absolutely OK. It takes a long time, but it is much safer than with hot air.

I had a microdrive 1st time around. If you copied files in reverse order you would load them the next time the game would load faster.

have ordered one of these and looking forward to trying it out when it arrives ! also love your setup there with the Amiga in the background ;)

I love seeing how many people this little machine has had a impact on over the years. I'll never forget the fun I had on this machine.