1981 CAD Monster - HP Series 200 9836C

The HP 9836 computer is incredible, expensive, uncommon, and unknown. I am so excited to have this one and thrilled to get it up and running!
Floppy drive refurbishing: • Floppy Drive Refurbing
HP Series 200 5.25" BASIC 4.0 Disk Images: archive.org/details/hp-series...
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[@TailRecursion]

It's something how getting color on your computer used to be impossible, then a big cost consideration, then it became commonplace, and now we just strap rainbow lights onto computers for fun.

[@NerdyMeathead]

Now we have hand held super computers that can fit in our pocket and we use them to record dumb dances and upload it to china

[@tarstarkusz]

Color on computers has been around a long time. I think color terminals at least goes back to the 70s. The main issue with color, I think, is the ram requirements. If you want 16 colors available per pixel, that's 4 bits per pixel. So that's a lot of ram in a 640x480. This was why so much early 80s color (like CGA) is per character and not pixel. It greatly cuts down on the ram requirements. 80x25 is only 2000 character cells while 640x480 is over 300,000 pixels.

[@jesuschristiscallingyou953]

That escalated! 😂

[@jesuschristiscallingyou953]

​@@NerdyMeathead😅

[@tezinho81]

​@@tarstarkusz indeed, I recall most of my 90s graphics cards could either either be configured for 1024*768 OR 64k colours, but not both, at least not without clipping some extra memory chips in!

[@kitchentroll5868]

My uncle was an architectural engineer and he had an HP9836 CAD workstation + HP 7440 plotter printer that he used well into the 1990s. I recall HP techs working on it during one visit and watching them replace caps to keep it working. My uncle abandoned it only when Softdesk was purchased by Autodesk which then summarily dropped all support for the "ancient" CAD software my uncle used.

[@mipmipmipmipmip]

I wonder if he had an on-site support extension, HP's pricing for that is something else 😀

[@ShainAndrews]

@@mipmipmipmipmip Any onsite support is priced accordingly.

[@jaapaap123]

Another thing ruined by autodesk!

[@jstro-hobbytech]

Back when hp innovated. Very cool man.

[@hateercenor]

Yep I've worked with tons of those types of engineers. Typically avoid them.

[@stubell2363]

Oh boy, blast from the past! I was in one of HP's IC departments back in the day (Hi fellow LID IC -ites!) and we used the 9836 series for IC CAD. Some fun facts: 1) The 256KB memory board was nick-named "Quarter Pounder" Of course, the 1MB memory board was the "Pounder" 2) The 9845B (predecessor to the 9836A/C) was used by Colin Cantwell for the Death Star walk through in Star Wars. 3) Later, Cantwell used the 9836C to create "A day in Loveland, CO" which walked through a full summer day. A view of the mountains started out with the sunny morning, went to an afternoon thunderstorm (lightning included!) then on to evening. Absolutely stunning, all done with palette manipulation. If you can find this, get it archived!!! 4) We (actually, Tom Baker) used the UCSD Pascal system (later Modcal - Pascal with module extensions) to write an IC CAD layout system, nicknamed Piglet (HP Integrated Graphics Local Editing Terminal). Piglet was eventually rewritten in C and released as a PC Board layout system. That should be out there somewhere. When I left HP in 1995, C Piglet was still being used for IC layout. By then it had migrated to HPUX workstations. 5) There was a internal game of Centipede written for the 9836C. I doubt it is available anywhere, but I brought a 9836C home to play it. It gave my wife nightmares after she played it! 6) By the time the 9800 series 200 was done, they were using the Motorola MC68040. I seem to recall those being in the later revs of the 9836C, but I'm probably wrong about that. All in all, lots of fond memories of the 9836C and its descendants.

[@stubell2363]

Forgot to add: SRM (Shared Resource Manager) was the network for HP workstations before Ethernet showed up. It was a hub-and-spoke system, so a server was required. One of my college roommates worked on that (Hi Carl!).

[@Look_What_You_Did]

I'd be very curious what the "atmosphere" of the Ft Collins facilities are like today. I was former DEC in the Springs. Man did things change fast around there. It is my understanding that campus is now closed which is crazy because that was a large campus. I left shortly after Hurd. I saw the righting on the wall. Engineering no longer had authority. I pointed out the last two CEO's golden parachutes NEVER received the scrutiny that my R&D budget did. Just one of those exit packages could have advanced a few of our projects significantly.

[@CptJistuce]

I was going to jokingly ask what kind of games were available for the system, but... apparently there actually is one.

[@fuzzywzhe]

Don't you love Carly Fiorina? You'd think HP wouldn't chose the worst woman possible for the job, but they did. She's so arrogant she can't learn from any of her mistakes.

[@stubell2363]

@@fuzzywzhe And Ann Livermore was *right there*! Idiots!

[@DaQpa]

Hi. Great video resurrecting this historic computer. I wrote the RMB graphics drivers in pascal. It was my first software project at HP. Before that I was responsible for qualifying the Tandon floppy drives. You wouldn’t believe what they sent us. The color map was a rather last minute addition to the product specs. It did make it more fun considering how slow the graphics drawing speed was. Much of the graphics primitives were in assembly so it went as fast as it possibly could.

[@edherdman9973]

I'm all ears. What did they send you?

[@dDAMKErkk]

Ik neukte me soms suf 🥱 Als u de transistor, en microelectronica, ontdekte vind ik u ‘een baas’, nu gewoon een dikkke kop…

[@spacedock873]

Exactly what I would expect from a Tier 1 manufacturer back in the day: everything is custom, nonstandard and eye-wateringly expensive! Having said that, I absolutely love the blocky design aesthetic. My Bachelor's degree dissertation project was to read HPGL design files (on a MicroVax II) and display them on a Tektronix graphics display terminal which also had a separate text display plane over the rendered images. The images took minutes to generate as even with compiled Pascal (the host machine was a 5MHz 32-bit lump - seriously expensive at the time!) the program had to squirt the terminal's ASCII control commands down a 9600 baud serial line. Not only that but the program had to parse the HPGL twice - firstly to work out the size of the final design so it could calculate a scale to fit into the terminal's 1024x1024 graphics capability and then to send the commands to the terminal doing the floating point scaling as it went. Kids these days could do the same thing 100 times faster on their mobile phones! 😂

[@herrbonk3635]

Yes, it's a great machine. But still very standard compared to older computers from HP and others. This one uses a standard µ-processor, standard memory ICs, standard TTL logic, multiplexers, bus drivers, and so on. Only the mechanics of it is fully custom, basically.

[@spacedock873]

@Herr Bönk Exactly. By taking standard commodity parts and building them into systems that used nonstandard protocols (like the HPIB and floppy format) they could gouge the customers into paying way over the odds. They (and other Tier 1 manufacturers) had got used to this pricing model when they produced unique hardware and tried to keep it going when they started using off-the-shelf components. Unfortunately for these manufacturers IBM messed it up by producing a machine that was too easy to copy and the rest is history! They tried to put the genie back in the bottle with the MCA architecture machines but obviously nobody was going to buy back into an expensive lock-in system when they could have cheap PC clones.

[@herrbonk3635]

@@spacedock873 Indeed. But to me, it was all much more fun and exciting before IBM PC clones took over everything in the mid 80s. Seeing all these creative and exciting new models in stores, at firms, schools and companies. And not just because I was younger :)

[@spacedock873]

@Herr Bönk Oh, I quite agree. Computing was much more exciting in the 80's with all the fast paced innovation, that is why I did a Computing Science degree in that era. Home computing is now reduced to how many FPS can be achieved in games and supercomputing is reduced to how many x86 cores can be squeezed in a 19 inch rack cabinet - everything traces back to the end of innovation caused by the IBM PC 😔

[@gotj]

Everyone had their own "standards" back then.

[@jarekjagielski366]

I love how the computer essentially has nearly 500 times more memory than a VIC20, which would have been also available. Blows one's mind.

[@ShieTar_]

Well, at almost 100 times the cost, and only 2-3 times the processing power, it sorely needed something to justify it's price.

[@jbritain]

Considering you can put up to 1.5TB in the 2019 Mac Pro (at an exorbitant price of course), stuff like that is still achievable

[@katrinabryce]

@@jbritain And you can put up to 2TB in the Thinkstation P620, though that would cost you something like €65,000 just for the RAM.

[@KiraSlith]

​@@katrinabryceTry $5k USD, or about 4.6k euro used. With inflation it's actually hilariously cheaper to get 2tb of ddr4 now than it was to equip this HP 9000 with 8mb of RAM back then, and you'd probably never find a use for even 1/4th that 2tb outside of large-scale compute tasks.

[@katrinabryce]

@@KiraSlith A 256GB stick costs a *lot* more than 4 x 64GB sticks, and to get 2TB, you need 8 x 256GB sticks. Right now I have 4 x 64GB sticks in mine, and I will likely add another 4 at some point.

[@tarstarkusz]

IBM offered a workstation option for the 5150. It had an updated graphics card roughly on par with SVGA for a whopping 10k extra dollars. It was specifically to be a cad station.

[@douro20]

It was called the Professional Graphics Adapter. It was also sold with the 5272 Color Display and 3270 character ROMS in the 5271 3270 Personal Computer, a special version of the 5160 designed to emulate a 3279 Color Display Terminal. It also had CGA emulation, though the extra colour tricks used with the original CGA card certainly wouldn't work. I actually had a 5271 as a kid- a Model 6 which had the 10MB hard disk drive. That system sold for $8,250 in 1985 with the monitor and special keyboard. There was also the 3270 PC/GX which added full professional graphics support using the APA (All Points Addressable) display system and a 19-inch 1024x1024 16-colour display. That was the most expensive XT-class PC configuration IBM ever sold, retailing for over $20,000.

[@stephenwalters9891]

@@douro20 I worked for an IBM dealer and I think we only ever sold a PGA once.

[@rommix0]

Hopefully IBM didn't offer one to the 8-bit guy lol

[@radman999]

​@@rommix0Lol.. burn

[@rommix0]

@@radman999 Yeah man. David will never live that moment down.

[@srfrg9707]

My dad was an architectural engineer and owned his own business. He is first computer in the 1960s was the Olivetti Programma 101 but he switched to HP when the HP85 was available in 1980. A few years later he bough an HP9836C. And what a beast it was. The Graphic capabilities where unseen at that time.

[@duckwerksofficial]

I work as an engineer and a lot of the older engineers/designers I work with refer to CAD workstations as "Tubes" I know it refers to the CRT display, but I always wondered what a CAD workstation would've looked like back when that was a contemporary term.

[@martianhighminder4539]

The Tektronix 4010 series of terminals were a popular option for early CAD displays. They could display persistent graphics cheaply with their storage tube technology (could specifically be what your co-workers are referring to?), along the with usual computer terminal functions.

[@duckwerksofficial]

@@martianhighminder4539i’ll have to ask next time. Thanks for the info!

[@duckwerksofficial]

@@Runco990i wonder if any of them used vector graphics like the vectrex.

[@noland65]

The first commercial CAD system was on a DEC PDP-1, by Adams Associates and Itek. The display was based on a CRT designed for scan radar, so this was a "serious" tube. (The software was designed in 1961/62.) The PDP-1 was also the first computer that we might call a workstation. (Nowadays we find this often classified as an "early mini", but the first minis - which came after this - were, as a concept, a serious down-grade from the PDP-1 architecture.) Compare "The First Commercial CAD System" by David Weisberg.

[@TheEvertw]

This particular model was not very popular. It got replaced quickly by other workstations. 3 years after this came out, the HP-9000 line came out which would be much more representative of the UNIX boxes (we called them boxes, not tubes). Other popular brands included Sun and SGI. They were amazing, many having 1024x1024 pixel resolution, optical mouses ("digitizers") and HUGE tubes.

[@BongWeasle]

I was an HP field service Engineer back in the 80s/90s we used these to run our calibration software on Network/Spectrum analysers like the HP8510 . The 9826 series was similar but not as powerful with a built in display but only one drive. HP was the best company in the world to work for as an Engineer.

[@hoofie2002]

From the days when HP made products designed by engineers FOR engineers. Function and maintenance was everything, cost was a secondary issue.

[@mybachhertzbaud3074]

Plus the added benefit of keeping your room nice and toasty warm in the winter.😜

[@patmx5]

I have a 1960 HP counter with north of 75 tubes in it (524C) that keeps things nice and toasty when turned on.

[@V3ntilator]

@@mybachhertzbaud3074I have 2 gaming PC's on 24 hours a day and they heat up the room during the winter no mattet how cold it is. If i need extra heat, i can just start AI video scaling on one of the PC's. lol

[@mybachhertzbaud3074]

......processing comments in my personal A.I.....(Antiquated Intelligence).........Eureka!!! I believe we have unknowingly solved the global warming issue! T urn them ALL Off and go for a walk.😜

[@lindsaycole8409]

For the instrument geeks out there. HPIB became GPIB when it became a wider standard.

[@stonent]

It makes me wonder what it would do if you plugged in a set of PET floppies to it.

[@blackrifle6736]

*You have a fine memory. Essentially Bill and Dave told IEEE it's the h/p way or the highway. Given that at the time h/p dominated the aerospace electronic instrumentation and their computing space, was a no-brainer. Cheers!*

[@blackrifle6736]

@@stonent *Probably nothing but spin and click, spin and click. h/p used a proprietary format interleave on 8", 5-1/4 and 3-1/2" floppies. Cheers!*

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

It already was a standard at this time--IEEE 488. Since HP invented it, they kept calling it “HPIB”, while everybody else said “GPIB”.

[@blackrifle6736]

@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 *Correct. Forgot about that.*

[@douro20]

This was HP's first computer that I know of to use a non-HP processor. An electronics shop I frequented quite often- and where I got my 5150 and PS/2 Model 25- had one in the front of the store.

[@blackrifle6736]

*h/p never made procs. Like old Apple, h/p bought Motorola 68000's for their 9800-series desktop computing controllers. Motorola procs were also used in many bench instruments. 8566A/B spectrum analysers first come to mind. With the LCD display mod, some still in use today. Cheers!*

[@douro20]

@@blackrifle6736 They certainly did. There was the "Nanoprocessor" which was used in certain control applications, the D5061-3xxx processor used in the HP 9825 which was a 3-chip hybrid based on the architecture of the HP 2100 minicomputer, the "Capricorn" which was an 8-bit CPU designed specifically for scientific computation used in the HP 80 series computers, the "Saturn" which is a 64-bit processor with a 4-bit data bus and 20-bit address space used in calculators, the "Focus" which was the world's first single-chip 32-bit microprocessor and a whole line of RISC CPUs known as PA-RISC.

[@ewhac]

During my first paying job as a programmer around 1983, I worked on the HP 9836A. I got to know that machine and its cousins very well. The company was called ICG (Integrated Computer Graphics), and they did architectural software (yes, in BASIC) for the home building market. Basically, you would enter the blueprints for a house, and our software would tell you how much it would cost to frame that house in wood. It kicked out schematic drawings, bills of materials, and cut lists. It was chiefly used by pre-fab home manufacturers who would frame the walls on a giant table in a factory, then truck the walls out to the building site and tilt them up. One of the features I wrote was to print out a 1:1 scale ribbon to be taped up on the edge of the assembly table showing exactly where the studs, cripples, and other framing members were to be placed (and there's a weird debugging story behind that one). I retained no copies of this software, nor do I know anyone who did. Since one of my burning interests at the time was 3D graphics, I wrote some subroutines that rendered the framing schematics as a 3D wireframe. It made the lead programmer happy, as it confirmed that the framing data inside the program was "real." You're not missing much with the Pascal environment. It's basically an implementation of UCSD Pascal, and it's _awful_ -- the very definition of user-hostile. More interesting is the MC68000 assembly language development environment. I used it to learn 68K assembly language (just in time for the Amiga), and used it to write a bootable version of Conway's Game of Life. I *_might_* still have a copy of this (the game, not the dev environment)... The disk format is very primitive. Each catalog entry is basically a filename, a starting offset, and a sector count. There is no sector map -- all files are laid out contiguously. This means you have to re-pack the disk files from time to time.

[@Alo762]

Later OS versions, both BASIC and Pascal, supported also HFS, which is basically BSD file system.

[@JesusisJesus]

“Hi honey, I bought one of those new fangled Computers l” - “Oh, how much was it?l

[@gregdee9085]

Dude, thanks so much for posting this. Do you remember the name of the Prefab company ? so they were doing that in '83 also? because seems that it's still a "new" idea in the architecture community.

[@ewhac]

@@gregdee9085 The only client I remember was named Wickes, which I dimly recall as being located in the southeast US. But all the online references I've found don't feel right, and it's possible I'm mis-remembering even that much.

[@jgunther3398]

i learned 68000 assembly language too. it was very straightforward and easy. it might have been the first micro with a 16 bit data bus. later spent about 10 years writing assembly for various motorola processors

[@iscariotproject]

its so retro it looks futuristic,i remember when a friend brought back a 486 and a 386 from america they where insanely expensive,we downloaded doom from a bbs took forever,and then we transferred it via parallel cable to the second computer so we could play together...my mind was blown.

[@adamzarate5547]

This brought back memories. You are right, the HP9836C was a beast, back in the day. We ran them on Pascal to test missile hardware. The ones I remembered had a Boot Rom Card, and all we had to load was the program via the floppy. These test stations had all types of instruments connected to the computer, they were very large. I'll be looking out for the next video.

[@Thaleios]

Your excitement is infectious. It reminded me of all the days and nights as a kid I spent tearing apart old computers and getting excited every time I learned something new.

[@gregorymccoy6797]

I love the deep dive you take for old tech. I really appreciate the effort.

[@thomaspleacher2735]

I enjoyed this video so much that I watched the whole entire thing. If you get actual CAD software working on this thing one day, I look forward to hearing about it from you.

[@michac3796]

I'd rather like to know where this machine actually was used in/for. Or what constituted that excess of a need so this monstrosity was actually developed... Kind of: "this computer was designed to crack the Enigma code" situation. What did this HP200 do, designing the first stealth plane?

[@blackrifle6736]

@@michac3796 *Nah. Every plantsite had huge glass-walled, raised floor mainframe rooms for that. Our 12 metrology labs used these as instrument controllers running calibration routines in HP Basic or ported/interpreted HPL. CAD was run in darkened rooms on DEC VAX Minis or 3270 terminals with 27" or 30" monochrome CRTs and trackballs. When the h/p Minis and 9000 Series 300's arrived, company-wide all 9836C's went to surplus sales on pallets. That was called a "refresh". Cheers!*

[@edherdman9973]

This might be just in the era where some of the cool software didn't have crazy dongles for copy protection. A lot of the neat stuff from later years (like the 90s) is no longer available for anybody, including hobbyists.

[@blackrifle6736]

@@edherdman9973 *IIRC, by the mid-80s h/p already had the dongle-as-proof-of-license tech down pat. Serial numbered, they plugged into an unused serial, parallel or HPIB port. Buyers choice.*

[@marcmckenzie5110]

In 1984 I went to work for HP in the Desktop Computer Division, working on learning products as well a the port of Bell Labs System V Unix to Series 200 and Series 500. My own desktop was a HP 9836C, just like this one. Viewers may know there were two OS offerings, Rocky Mountain BASIC and Pascal Workstation. Later on HP-UX was released on this platform. My next job was field sales & tech support, and later business development for the installed base of these customers. Ultimately I was the Product Marketing Manager for Motorola 6800 based family of products, and all older products still in support life (think the HP 9825, 9835, 9845, Series 200, 300, and 400). HP was a really great company in those years, and we had “invent” in everything we did. If it is useful to your channel, I’d be glad to help with questions or share stories both about the great people behind these products, and our brilliant customers who bought and used them. It was great to see this fun trip into the past!

[@TechTangents]

Hello! That is really fun to read about this thing more in it's time. Everything I get from HP in this era is incredible so I bet it was a very unique experience to be there! I do have one question you might be able to help with as I've been trying to research exactly what software I could get running on this. From my research reading some of the HP Journal magazines from the day, I'm guessing the CAD software I showed on the brochure around 1:54 was EGS/200? It seems like it was possibly the only CAD package available before HP-UX and HP DesignCenter/PCDS which needed the more powerful CPU cards. Was there any other CAD software before EGS/200 that would run on this? I still need to learn more, but I think even if I could find EGS/200 the ID PROM security would make it difficult to get running.

[@marcmckenzie5110]

@@TechTangents I’ve been thinking about this. If I recall correctly, at that time, HP was developing it’s own engineering solutions. EGS was one of them, and I think we had a EE solution as well. Ultimately this evolved into Design Systems Group, which had both the workstation business, and the application business. There was a company in Fort Collins Colorado, which bought many of the Rocky Mountain Basic and Pascal Workstation applications, and supported them for many years as legacy products. It’s been so many years I can’t remember the name of the outfit, but I imagine they are retired and long out of business. We also had an organization inside DSG called the Technical Software Center, which recruited third-party applications as the investment in HP-UX took off. When I get a chance, I’ll pick the brains of a few old friends from that group to see what they remember.

[@tobylifers3390]

Shelby's determination and focus never ceases to amaze me.

[@MrFreeElectron]

This thing essentially runs Rocky Mountain Basic (rmb). That is still around and sold by a company called Transera. It goes under the name HTbasic and is still being actively developed ! Hewlett Packard's RMB is not your garden variety basic. RMB can do matrix transforms, supports complex and imaginary numbers, fourier transforms, urve fitting and a whole slew of mathematical operations. it also has an extensive graphics and plotting instruction set. Displaying and editing charts, tables, graphs is a snap. RMB contains instructions you will not find in any other programming language unless you load libraries or toolkits. RMB has it built- in and part of the language ! The Windows implementation (HTbasic) can run existing code unmodified, but adds a ton of new capabilities , including driving test equipment over LXI (LXI is essentially GPIB over a Lan connection). No need to configure anything : simply issue a read or write command to a "port". The GPIB subsystem behaves as a virtual file. You open the file with the given address and simple read and write. There is no doubt, somwhere in a corner of a huge telescope control room , or military aircraft support cart or similar long-lifespan equipment, one of these still chugging away running 40 year old code on 40 year old hardware , or on a pc running windows 11 with HTbasic. These machines pushed the boundaries of what was possible in the 80's so hard they ended up still being used in 2023.

[@naoidfpaiourej3299]

This is an incredible machine for 81. I'm old enough to have been involved in the early 80s home computing boom here in the UK. Clearly this machine is a completely different level in terms of its original cost and intended use, but I had no idea of this or its ilk's existence. My Brother works for HP - I'll send him this and see if he or his workmates know it! Great Video!

[@frankwales]

01:40 "The 9836 is essentially a direct continuation [of the Series 80]"... Not really, as they were designed and made by different divisions: the Series 80 came from Corvallis Division in Oregon (which was the calculator division spun out of the Advanced Products Group in Cupertino in the mid 70s), while the 9836 came from the Desktop Computer Division in Fort Collins, Colorado, building on the earlier desktop calculators such as the 9825. If you compare the HP BASIC that each machine uses, you'll find they have significant differences, to the point where even syntax for many simple commands is incompatible. This is because they were developed independently, with no over-arching HP computing strategy to tie things together. Any similarities are more like convergent evolution than any kind of descendant relationship. (FYI: I worked a lot with HP in the 80s and 90s, and was a heavy user and developer on 200 Series, 500 Series and 80 Series machines, as well as a developer for HP-41 & HP-71, and worked at Corvallis division for a time.)

[@TechTangents]

Maybe I should have specified that is is a continuation "conceptually". It doesn't have anything in common from a technical perspective, other than HP-IB. But it has the BASIC programming focus, alpha/graphics visual layers, focus on interfacing with hardwaere, and several other features not really found in other machines. Maybe it was more just how HP operated at the time, but after having use the Series 80 stuff myself this felt similar but also like a significant evolution of it as well.

[@djrmarketing598]

This was absolutely amazing. My father was into all these old machines back in the early 80's, from Superbrain CP/M machines to Cromemco System 3 with 4 8 inch floppy drives. I was a very young kid playing on these systems and learned BASIC and how to use CP/M back then. My dad had used all this stuff to make a point of sale system and parts lookup for his Honda/Kawasaki motorcycle dealership in like 1983 which is absolutely INSANE to think how forward thinking that was. He made his own software in BASIC from books full of program listings, making modifications, even had transferred parts libraries from HONDA from mainframe format to old 10 MB hard drives. He spent tens of thousands on all that stuff. I remember he told me he paid like $3000 for a 10mb hard drive that was in a whole separate box - I can close my eyes and still remember seeing it from when I was maybe 6 or 7.

[@chrisjackson3587]

i remember our first family computer, it had 8 megs of ram and a 133mhz processor in it, and that was in 1997... totally wild to see this beast in action with more ram and processing power than i knew could exist in one system in 1981... these are great videos, you do them so well!!! great work!!!

[@DougDingus]

That is a super interesting machine! I live that time period. So many different implementations of various ideas in play. Lots to learn about.

[@user-dl8sx9rt1f]

We used several of these where I worked (Memorex applied research for disk drives). We did not get them or use them for CAD. Instead we got them to interact with HPIB & GPIB instrumentation because no test instruments existed that could measure what we needed. We also used them for computer based simulations. I recall it being a good deal less than $25,000 so we probably didn't have all the bells & whistles. Comparing the price directly to other computers of the day is very misleading for two reasons (a) the 98x6 came with hardware that the others did not and was expensive to add (b) the build in hardware, such as the HPIB, had very easy to use drivers built in; other computers required massive amount of time to write software to integrate & use such features. For example, PCs needed different graphics software for different graphical capabilities: CGA vs EGA, vs VGA - rewrite when you changed yet all seamless with HP; Want to change from a 1 pen plotter to an 8 pen plotter with HP: disconnect and replace - done! We were in the business of developing disk drive technology, not screen/plotter/interface/whatever software. We did a hard look at the cost of HP 9836C versus an Apple IIe(?) - HPO hardware was clearly more expensive but the cost of adding just the driver software to the Apple negated that. I recall in my lab we had the following attached: plotter. printer, logic analyzer (Biometrics??), Tektronics digitizing oscilloscope, frequency analyzer, laser interferometer, a custom HPIB card, and a GPIO to directly control the test stand for disk seeking & read/write.

[@blackrifle6736]

*Yep. Good odds it was a Biometrics or Gould. h/p 8-pen plotter 98xxA (not later 7550A) was fun to watch. Man, it was fast. Cheers!*

[@runrin_]

please make more videos with this machine. maybe someone on vcfed has some more software they could image for you? i'd really love to see you use it with a plotter and a CAD program

[@jklein3480]

Very cool. We had at least 4 of these computers donated to my college lab from HP. We wrote our our cad program and tons of test measurement software. Mostly in pascal. I converted most of those to an HP RISC machine later on. We used the RS232 for all data transfer, writing our own software on both sides. There were many expansion cards. One had a programming language on it. Might have been BASIC. We also had an external hard drive connected to it. And used the HP-IB to connect to all our testing stations. One of our computers had all the 1MB memory cards in it. It was a beast.

[@DavisMakesGames]

Thank you for this video! What a fascinating machine. To this day, HP has kept the simple, professional, blocky look of their workstations and I quite like it. I've worked with HP's workstations going back to the mid 1990s but unfortunately never seen something like this in person.

[@HansOvervoorde]

That machine is beyond awesome! 2.7 Mbytes of RAM was unimaginable at the time.

[@typingcat]

Is it like having 2.7TB of RAM now?

[@HansOvervoorde]

@@typingcat good question. I find translation to today a bit difficult as at the time RAM-size defined which functionalities could run at all where todays RAM-size defines to which memory-size any functionality runs smoothly. At that time one could not create a CAD image at all when the RAM-size was below a certain limit. Today, even the cheapest computers, smartphones and tablets can create CAD images. When the CAD image gets very complicated and big however, things still work but very slow on hardware with not much RAM, less powerful processor and less powerful graphics unit.

[@Breakfast_of_Champions]

The Commodore's 64 Kbytes in 1982 were considered huge, a real step forward. Just a handful of years later, the megabytes were upon us.

[@Potts1966]

Amazing machine but also amazing to realise that within 4-5 years the Amiga and ST did more for a tiny fraction of the price. The pace of evolution with tech in the 80's was breath taking.

[@IrreverentSOB]

Fantastic, just this video alone made my monthly internet payment worth it, it brought back memories from 40 years ago when I used an HP-85 to run RF circuit simulation to design filters, antennas and many other related circuits, thanks for making stuff like this !

[@blackrifle6736]

*Had forgotten about the 85. Used to run an Allen Variance cal program for ovenised Xtal oscillators on one. Cheers!*

[@agrajag45]

Was great to see this. I was able to use a 9836 in the early 80's when I was a co-op student working for a research unit in a company that later spun into PMC Sierra. I wrote a fairly large (for the day) simulation in HP Basic. I think I have the printout in my work term report filed away someplace. It was such a cool machine- loved that rotary scroll wheel when programming.

[@JimmyCall]

I remember my friend's dad having something similar at work. He was using it to design communications towers and stress measures. It may have been an earlier model as before he was assigned it, he was given a presentation first batch new era Motorola CPU (to memory it was the 68000) that was at the heart of the computer. One of the demos on the computer he showed me and his son was a planet gravity simulator.

[@blackrifle6736]

*Correct. It was Motorola 68000. Cheers!*

[@thepresi2]

I love this kind of videos! Thanks so much for sharing!

[@peterlemon1385]

Very interesting video, I love seeing these obscure old workstations still running today, great job =D

[@lawrenceengel3330]

This is a fantastic blast from the past, well done 👍

[@thenoblerot]

That beautiful machine is in the right hands. Excellent video! I hope we see more of this unique computer!

[@slowlymakingsmoke]

Brilliant video. These older and definitely more obscure machines are so interesting.

[@doncapo732]

Wonderful video, thank you so much for providing such great coverage for such an obscure machine. Excellent work, thank you!

[@clappinmonkey0944]

I find it amazing that people like yourself can resurrect old 80s pcs like this meanwhile im struggling trying to get a hdd to register on a 486 so i can load dos 6.22 lol

[@gwivongalois6169]

Those were built to last. From engineers for engineers. And it's the good HP, not the we sell gold ink in tiny cartridges HP.

[@patmx5]

@Gwi von Galois Bill and Dave are doubtless spinning in their graves over what’s become of the previously cutting edge instrumentation company that they started in a garage and grew to a world technology leader in only a few decades.

[@TheStefanskoglund1]

A HP 9836, that isn't a PC. I don't believe you would call a HD Honda in front of a bunch of Bandido members ?

[@clappinmonkey0944]

@TheStefanskoglund1 oof that really bothered you huh?

[@blackrifle6736]

@@patmx5 *Just to put into perspective: By 1980 h/p's computing, printer and plotter divisions were already providing over 60% of h/p's revenue using much less resources and overhead expense. This is why T&M side of h/p kept being deprecated and spun-off and finally ended up as KeySight. Thickest h/p catalog was 1977 edition. Cheers!*

[@RetroJack]

Shelby, you continue to amaze me with the systems you find - well done!

[@sagejpc1175]

It's always a good day when Tech Tangents uploads!

[@bytesandbikes]

I love old HP equipment. They didn't do anything by half!

[@Jsyz99]

I worked in Aerospace in the late 70s, early 80s and the HP Controllers were used for automated testing of control systems using the HPIB. I worked with the predecessor, the HP 9835 and later the 9826. I don't remember using a 9836, but I know I've seen one. I remember seeing one in an "old parts" storage area and I would love to get my hands on it.

[@soundguydon]

This is fantastic! Never heard of these and don't even remember seeing them in any of my computer magazine articles of the day! Excellent find!

[@blackrifle6736]

*If you were reading Byte and the like, probably not. Cheers!*

[@markocebokli6565]

There were "hpcat" and "hpcopy" DOS programs that could read and write the HP's "LIF" format as used by the 200. You had to format the floppies on the 200, then you could read/write them on a DOS PC. I probably still have these somewhere.

[@BaconbuttywithCheese]

Your passion is palpable. Excellent peek into the past.

[@corneliusbuckley8897]

Just found your channel! Even tho I'm a 90s kid, I love the combination of familiarity and nostalgia yet still new and interesting explanations and breakdowns.

[@chuckmiles56]

Hey man just found your channel. Watched this video and really enjoyed. Don’t know computers but like the way you explained things. 25 Grand from ‘81. Insane.

[@craighaney8829]

Man what a blast from the past. I ran on of those stations back in 86/87 I believe the Company I worked for bought the system in 84 or 85. Racking my brain to remember the cad software we used. I remember the company was bought out by Carrier corperation (Pretty sure). We had two 9836c stations connected to a hard disk that was the size of a 2 drawer file cabinet with a tape drive on top. I Think it was a 7933 drive 400 mb. and a 8 pin hp plotter. I was told the whole system set the company back $100k, back when I made $5.50 an hour. We used it till 1989 when we switched to pc's on a token ring network with dual Sun Sparc servers/ Workstations. And AutoCadd. with DCA.

[@TR3A]

I used to be a Systems Engineer at HP for these machines. They were fantastic and extraordinarily well built. Although I enjoyed the video, there is lots of incorrect info. While it was popular for CAD, it was more often used for instrument control (at least in my part of the world). As mentioned by others, the BASIC environment was incredible; I wish a similar BASIC was available now. Full schematics were available so that lots of users built custom cards for it. For its time it was magnificent. Being the top of the line it sold in smaller numbers than its less expensive brethren (9816, 9826). Thanks for the trip down memory lane!

[@blackrifle6736]

*HP-IB controller? Yes, by the hundreds. On every engineering Dept manager's desk? Yes, and we had LOTS of managers. CAD? Never saw one used for that. Cheers!*

[@phillipradcliffe9944]

Hi - Thank for you video, as it brought back some faded memories. Back in the day - mid-1980s - I was an engineer at a large HP site, not the one that built the 9836C, but one that used extensive amounts of this equipment. Note that none of the Series 200 computers were used for CAD, but rather for testing, or instrument and process control. HP BASIC was an interpreted language based on an HP version of Pascal called MODCAL. HP BASIC had essentially one command string per line and a maximum of allowable program lines. Since it was interpreted, the labels could be stripped away, essentially obscuring what the program was doing. There was a CAD program called HP Draft which was a 2D drafting program that would run on a series 200, but it was elementary. The Series 300 computers, running Pascal on HPUX and coupled with a TurboSRX graphics engine was a very capable 3D CAD work platform using a application called Solid Designer. Our division had dozens of 340/TurboSRX workstations networked together. Eventually, early 2000’s or so, PTC bought Solid Designer and rebranded it as Direct Design.

[@mikefinn2101]

Fantastic video and explanation really appreciate your time and efforts sharing something so interesting really loved it brought back memories

[@ukozi]

Beautiful machine and you did it justice even without the cad demo. Great work!

[@raptor96]

I love your video! I enjoy looking at vintage computer hardware. Welp, after having subscribed, I have plenty to keep me busy watching. Thank you!

[@airfixer9461]

Great video, great research and troubleshooting...I've never seen anything like it..loved it

[@ninja011]

Dude, this machine brings me back. The school I went to in the early '90s had one of these for the CAD class. It was used as a network Master machine that the Amiga 2000s were networked into. I miss working on those machines.

[@MartyGarrison]

These were mostly used as lab computers connected to the various HP instruments. I used them at Fairchild Semiconductor connected to HP Semiconductor Parameter Analyzer. We controlled the instrument, plotted the data, stored the data and did some basic statistics on the data. We had several of them in our dept. Other groups had them connected to other electronic test equipment doing similar things. We added a 10MB hard drive to ours.

[@daishi5571]

I remember building a floppy exerciser for those drives lol That is a system I have never had the privilege of using or servicing, it looks super interesting. When you were talking about the palette swapping demo I was thinking about the Amiga Boing Ball demo. Thank you for sharing.

[@aw34565]

Great video. My first job was programing a HP9826, with the smaller monitor than the HP9836, in HP-BASIC. Nice computer and also a nice BASIC.

[@GrizzLeeAdams]

If you would like a maxed out SRAM card, please let me know. I still have some available from a run I did a while back. 7.5MB is the max ram you can put in a 200 series machine, and these boards let you do that in a single slot, and are much faster (essentially 0 wait state) than the DRAM boards I've tested. I have an SRM server, which is a slightly modified 200, and the one card I wish I could get software for is the 80286 DOS Coprocessor board. I have only heard back from one person who thinks they have the tape with the software but wasn't willing to dump it or send it off to someone who had the capability to dump it.

[@jackgerberuae]

This HP could run a coprocessor card?

[@garyfritz4709]

Great find! And an excellent job of resurrection. I worked at HP starting in 1979 -- not on the 98426/9836/Series 200 you show here, but on its "big brother," the Series 500. The 9836 was designed in the building next door. It's hard to imagine what it was like back then, before ANYthing was standardized. When we started on the 9826 & 500, there was no standard to design to. The IBM PC was still a glimmer in IBM's eye, there were no standard disk formats, even basic things like Ethernet and TCP/IP were still a few years away. So we had to invent EVERYTHING from scratch, custom everything. That was the biggest reason these beasties were so eye-wateringly expensive. Many many things were done VERY differently than what we're used to today. The Series 200/300 family was a very well-engineered and successful product, a great match for its target market. The Series 500 had amazing engineering but was much too expensive for the market, so the 200/300 won. But in an era when multi-processing was unknown and you had to reprogram DIP switches to add a RAM card, the 500 supported full multi-processing on multiple CPUs -- power down, plug in a couple of cards, power up, and shazam you magically had more RAM and more CPUs. Unheard-of at the time. It used a custom-designed CPU, I believe the very first 32-bit CPU-on-a-chip, with a stack-based architecture, believe it or not. The BASIC implementation had tech like run-time (just-in-time) compilation. It was amazing engineering but it missed the market. When it was clear the 500 was going to fail, a friend and I suggested a new product direction for the hardware -- "There's this thing called UNIX ..." So the 500 and then the 300/9836 became the first platforms for HP-UX, one of the first commercial UNIX implementations. You should find a copy of HP-UX for your 9836!

[@TechTangents]

Very cool insights, thanks for sharing! How I wish I could run HP-UX on it! This one has the early CPU card which lacks the MMU needed to run HP-UX. If I ever find a card I can upgrade it with I will definitely be giving that a shot because it would be really fun to check out.

[@garyfritz4709]

Bummer! It would be fun to see HP-UX on it. My buddy and I did a rotation into the marketing department, and trained the entire HP worldwide field on what this new UNIX stuff was. Fun times!

[@StitchJones]

I've heard about this computer, but never saw one before. This is just freaking wild to see.

[@sn1000k]

Really enjoyed this, yr a brilliant dude! Thanks for sharing.

[@Hamboarding]

Great showcasing! Just discovered your channel! Never heard of this system!

[@user-zo4cj8hw6w]

I see why that's your favorite computer! It's pretty amazing and I'd love to see more of it.

[@grahamcooper6476]

I loved these machines - 9836 and 9826! I implemented many ATE applications, besides doing precision analogue filter design with a program called CIRCAN. And of course there was a super word processor from UCLA! The IBM PC was like taking a step back in time! Those 9836 days were happy days!

[@Mainbusfail]

Man, you are just like some of my best friends. Computers are our drug. I could kick it with you any day. Love the enthusism, I used to work part time as a repair tech for a computer recycling company here in Tulsa, I spend my entire check every week on some amazing finds. My best so far was a Corona Portable PC (Suitcase) Computer with integrated 8 inch amber crt and a 5-1/4" Hd floppy drive and the keyboard seconded as the front cover of the computer chassis. Good Times.

[@dereinzigeweg]

Awesome s#it! Especially getting the 3,5 images to work by emulating on the socket 370 pc. Very nice video, fascinating machine and a pleasure to watch, thank you for doing all that!

[@ladronsiman1471]

Early 80's we had a HP3000 at my university ..I fell in love with HP technology while learning Fortran . It was so good .. This is why i collect HP Led watches mainly HP-01

[@thevintageaudiolife]

in 1985 my brother-in-law owned a video rental store, I remember getting dibs on the latest VHS videos as they came in. One day, this slick guy walked into the store and sold my brother-in-law a $10K HP computer with another $5K in software and keyboard and mouse and another $3K for onsite technical support and another $1k for training for a few hours. A lot of damn money in 1985! But he was making lots of money at his rental store! he still has that computer somewhere at home and sometimes we talk about the most expensive computer on earth that never worked hahaha 🤭

[@peterbecker-heidmann172]

My first computer at work was a HP 9845 B build in 1980, very similar and a bit bigger with 2 CPUs (16 bit as far as I remember). I loved this machine. HP offered also a C version which had a color monitor. We used the 9845 until around 1992, when the repair fees had gone up to standard 1000 $ (even when only a 5 ct worth small lamp in the tape drive, sensing the end of tape, had to be replaced). I enjoyed your video, especially the sequence of taking apart brought back memories of my own repair sessions with the 9845 which looks quite similar inside. Thanks for this great video!👍

[@blackrifle6736]

*9835's and 9845s were on a whole 'nother level. Like our 9825S and T's, we used them until the rubber rollers turned to mush and were NLA from h/p parts. Cheers!*

[@donaldl43]

I worked for Hughes Aircraft Company in the late 80s. We were working on the Millstar satellite. I used one of those 9836's to write basic programs to test parts of the satellite. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.

[@cptsalek]

This is a really great system, looking forward to more videos covering it. :)

[@bigtexbbq6347]

Former HP service tech back in the 80s. Appreciate the memories of days gone by.

[@asgerms]

Super video, had me glued!

[@sidthetech7623]

Glorious... That old IBM reminded me of my first childhood computer ... in like 1995. Glorious BASIC.

[@timothyp8947]

What a fabulous machine. I love seeing workstation computers in action; must be something to do with using Sun 3s at the start of my IT career, although perhaps these kinds of HP beasties are a class of their own. I wonder with its HP-IB if this series would’ve also found use for controlling HP test equipment as well as running CAD - it seems to be a major use-case for its predecessors such as the HP 85.

[@TheStefanskoglund1]

The lab measuring engine crank axle gears (and other gears too) at Volvo in Skövde (so todays truck operations) had a measuring machine with a HP 9000 as a front. I would expect at least one example program for running a HP tone generator in that example disk.

[@rocknodora9002]

Your so knowledgeable. Very well explained.

[@misteryman5109]

Great video. If I recall correctly my dad used one of these or one very similar in the early 90s. It was used for inventory management and printing.

[@brantzmyers5410]

I started working at HP in 1989, so I missed this period by a few years - what a beauty!

[@jackilynpyzocha662]

This is fabulous, thank you!

[@Kenrro]

Awesome Work man! Looks like it requires a LOT of patience!

[@RememberingMaryEvely]

Wow! Between 1980 and '84 I worked as a tech on the assembly lines for 9825s, '26s and '36s. I tested and repaired them before they were shipped. I became intimately familiar with their architecture and witnessed the evolution from "desktop calculator" to "workstation" first-hand. Depending on your need you could run HPL, RMB, Pascal or HP-UX. One big innovation was memory mapping which allowed much more memory than the processor could directly address. HP had partnered with Motorola for early access to new processor designs. My role in that agreement was to detect errors and, using a logic analyzer (HP, of course), determine the exact sequence of instructions that led to to a failure. I built my own '36 from reject parts (remember that Johnny Cash song about the Cadillac?). It was not uncommon then to find an open in a trace in a multi-layer PCB. We could add a jumper wire, but if too many jumpers were required, the board was rejected. I had no case parts, except for the bezel of the keyboard which had a nasty gouge in it. I had no display unit, but my my wife came home from a garage sale with a small monochrome monitor and I was able to soup it up to handle the higher bit rate. The characters were small and a bit blurry, but readable. I tipped the card cage on end and mounted it on a wooden plank so it would require a smaller footprint and not need a fan. HP auctioned off some obsolete equipment to employees and I got a thermal printer for less than $2 as I recall. It had once retailed for over $5K. I had very little software, however, and once I had a PC there was no looking back, so I finally trashed the "9836X".

[@ppg_forever]

I loved the microwave aesthetic of the CRT.

[@realRichHunting]

So cool. Thanks for the video!

[@SquallSf]

Excellent video! Fantastic job! I'm looking forward for part 2, especially seeing Pascal/CAD in action! It will be interesting if share more specifications of the model you have. From the demo I think the video has like 2 layers(maybe even more) - one for text, one for graphics. So knowing number of layers, sprites, 16 colors but how many actual palettes, max number of colors, max number of colors that can be shown on screen, audio capabilities, ...

[@ajslim79]

finally done ! as usual after all the dust.. blood, sweat and tears invested in it :D

[@johnnystall9683]

This was so cool, thank you!

[@arglebargle17]

Holy moly! What a blast from the past. In my late teens, I programmed for Lear Siegler. They had one of these critters and I played a game on it that I later re-implemented in 3D for Second Life. For the day, that HP was a remarkable computer.

[@troywest]

This is Nerdvana - Love your channel - learning a lot 🙂

[@BenState]

How do you only have 183K subscribers man? Great work!

[@alanhoggard4554]

Nice! My high school drafting class had one of these in the mid 80s

[@deplinenoise]

Very cool. Thanks for sharing!

[@bobweiram6321]

I get the warm and fuzzies watching Canadian retrocomputing videos. It's like Canada is a cozy land stuck in the 90s.

[@mackjsm7105]

wow bud!! ty u for all that work!

[@kingneutron1]

That's pretty amazing tech for the early 80's, thanks for the video - and for sharing the software :) The people that actually made the thing are likely long-retired or dead, so whatever new software you can make available or program will be a nice contribution.