Original HP 3000 brochure

[DougPeckover]

Hi everyone. I worked for HP in the early 70’s and am writing a book that contains information about the first release of the HP 3000. One of the brochures had three interlocking circles representing batch, online, and real-time instruments (this third was later dropped because it was one of the reasons why the initial performance was so bad). Does anyone have this brochure with the three circles? Thanks… Doug Peckover

[elinick]

Wow, something I actually know about! I too worked at HP, but I started in 1982. I worked in field service (CE) and then as a "guru" in the centralized support organization for the HP3000. I do recall seeing such marketing materials, but I don't have any. You are correct the "real time" moniker was really the HP 1000 series. I'm guessing we have a lot of common friends. :-)

[Felix Stehli]

Hi Doug, is this what you mean?

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/hp/3000/hp3000/..._Feb73.pdf

[DougPeckover]

My apologies but I somehow missed this.

Yes!!!! This is what I was looking for… many thanks.

Some HP 3000 trivia. I was working for HP Australia at the time and my boss Dr. Bill Caelli witnessed the benchmark that failed, leading to the original 3000 being withdrawn. He recommended a 64-bit solution by simply having twin banks of memory but they instead rewrote MPE which took much longer. What might have been!

[Garth Wilson]

(01-09-2024 11:09 AM)Felix Stehli Wrote:  Hi Doug, is this what you mean?

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/hp/3000/hp3000/..._Feb73.pdf

My computer says that's a plain text file, and the document viewer won't open it (nor will the text editor).

[AnnoyedOne]

(09-12-2024 03:40 PM)Garth Wilson Wrote:  My computer says that's a plain text file...

I checked and it is PDF v1.3 format. Opens fine in Adobe Reader 9.5.5 and 11.0.23.

A1

[Maximilian Hohmann]

Hello!

(09-12-2024 03:40 PM)Garth Wilson Wrote:  My computer says that's a plain text file, and the document viewer won't open it (nor will the text editor).

Very strange: I can view it in the internet browser just like any other .pdf

If I download it straight away (right click on the link) neither Adobe Acrobat nor Preview (the standard .pdf reader that comes with Mac OS) can open it.

But when I store it on the computer using the download button of the .pdf viewer inside the browser then I get a perfectly normal .pdf file on my computer.

Regards
Max

NB: I have never come across an HP3000 in real life. But during an internship ca. 1981 I was allowed to use an HP1000 which must have been it's little brother.

[AnnoyedOne]

Old (textish) format. I looked.

Newer viewers may not be able to decode it. Web browsers probably can (for old stuff).

A1

[born2laser]

Not exactly on topic, but seeing the brochure brought it back to me, I don't know how common my experience is but back in the 80's I worked on an HP3000, but never actually saw the machine!
While I was a student I got a gig on a lab that worked on Mossbauer Spectroscopy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6ssb...ectroscopy). Their experiment was measuring gamma spectra with some old (50's technogy?) multichannel counters that spat out matrices of numbers to a teletype. The printouts were typed back into perforated cards and fed to peak fitting software that ran in an old IBM mainframe. This was delightfully primitive, as the teletypes printed in 9 columns and the software expected it in 10 columns (or the other way around, don't quite remember), so what they did was to literally cut the printouts in stripes and paste them rearranged in the correct number of columns before passing it to the typists that entered the data on the perforated cards.
Their new setup was an HP150 that replaced the teletypes and read the multichannel counters into text files. This computer was connected as a terminal to an HP3000 somewhere else in the building. My job was twofold, first to port the peak fitting software (FORTRAN, I believe) so that it ran in the HP3000, I had to change only the input section, the program needed some input parameters that in the IBM used commands that were not standard FORTRAN and did not exist in HP FORTRAN. So after I figured out what those strange (to me) commands did it was simple. The second part of the job was to clean up the silly 9 vs 10 columns business. I looked a bit into changing the peak fitting software to accept the right number of columns, but gave up the idea, too much risk of breaking something in the code, so I just wrote a BASIC program that reshuffled the data files in a format readable by the software as it was.
In any case that was a huge improvement over the earlier arrangement and they were happy. Never talked to them again, so I don't know how long the setup lasted, probably not long since PCs were becoming more capable by them and could do the whole thing in a more practical way

[Maximilian Hohmann]

Hello!

(09-12-2024 08:28 PM)born2laser Wrote:  ...so I don't know how long the setup lasted, probably not long since PCs were becoming more capable by them and could do the whole thing in a more practical way

I also experienced this while I had a student job mid 1980ies in a research lab. There was a test stand which was connected to a PDP11 with those enormously huge removable hard disks and a data acquisition unit the size of a large fridge. From one day to another, they replaced the PDP 11 with a PC that had a built-in data acquisition card that could take 10 times more samples per second. It also had a very smart FORTRAN compiler that fitted on a single floppy disk and ran under MS-DOS. Of course I copied that disk for the HP-150 that I already had then, but as usual, HP's MS-DOS was just not compatible enough.

Regards
Max

[Pierre]

(01-06-2024 08:34 PM)DougPeckover Wrote:  I worked for HP in the early 70’s

Thanks for bringing back old memories...
On 13 Jul 1973, my eighteenth birthday, I didn't know that exactly ten years later I would be working on HP-3000 for many years.
Old nostalgia for MPE...

[BruceH]

I like the way that just 10 tapes are enough for everything you might want to do! :-)