HP-110 Portable Laptop DOS Drivers

[Gerry Schultz]

Hi All, long time since I posted. I just received an HP-110 Portable Laptop and already have an HP9114B floppy drive to connect to it through HP-IL. In my initial studies, I found that the file format used by the 110 is not the same as what a standard DOS machine uses. I sent an email off to Sydex who makes HP DOS drivers and here's their response:

Dear Gerry,

Thank you for your inquiry about our HP drivers. Sometime earlier
this year, HPMUSEUM.ORG asked for permission to post our DOS-level HP
100 drivers on HPMUSEUM.ORG, for use by members. We gave our
permission, and sent the last available versions.

We are not sure where on HPMUSEUM.ORG our drivers may have been
posted, but please do contact that organization. Sydex no longer
sells copies of the drivers.

Just one warning: use of these drivers requires a DOS system with a
legacy diskette drive. That is, a USB diskette drive cannot be used
with any of our drivers.

Best regards,
Miriam St.Clair


Where are the drivers located?

Thanks,
Gerry

[Michael Fehlhammer]

Hi Gerry,

it was me who contacted Chuck Guzis from Sydex and got the DOS drivers for HP Portable / Plus file format. I sent them to Dave Frederickson who suggested to post the files at the forum. Chuck gave his permission for publishing, but he is not willing to provide any support since he can't remember the details after more than 20 years.
Here are the files (two drivers in one zip archive):

  hpplus.zip (Size: 5.16 KB / Downloads: 36)

And that's what Chuck could remember about them:
> I did some digging last night after I sent you the archive. I note
> that there were two formats for the Portable Plus--a 9-sector and a 5-sector.
> The HP110.SYS file is for the 9 sector and the HP=PPLUS.SYS is for
> the 5-sector Portable Plus.
>
> I found newer (ca. 1995) versions of both drivers. The good news is
> that you need only insert a CONFIG.SYS line of the following form:
>
> DEVICE=HP-PPLUS.SYS
>
> or
>
> DEVICE=HP110.SYS
>
> The driver will locate a drive of the appropriate type automatically,
> so there's no /F switch. You can, however, force a drive selection
> with the /D:x switch.

By the way:
I never used these drivers because my Portable Plus / 9114B can read DOS disks which were written by a standard pc without any problems.
Maybe it doesn't work the other way round - when a pc tries to read disks written to by a Portable. I didn't try that yet.

[Dave Frederickson]

There was another formatting program for the Portable PLUS called formibm that formatted a floppy on a PC to a capacity somewhere between the PC's 720k and the Portable PLUS's capacity. It is reported that this format can be read and written by both the PC and Portable PLUS. The program was distributed through Personalized Software and can be found on the Portable Paper 1988 Subscriber's Disk.

Edit: Here's an Atari document that discusses formibm.

Dave

[Dave Frederickson]

(09-30-2014 07:26 PM)Gerry Schultz Wrote:  ... DOS-level HP 100 drivers ...
... a USB diskette drive cannot be used ...

The above pretty much translates to "a vintage PC must be used". Many of the old utilities like the Sydex drivers access the floppy controller at a low level, so that's why USB drives won't work. A list of tested floppy controllers can be found at Daves Old Computers. Here's the list and an FDC test.

I use a 450 MHz PII and an Adaptec AHA-1542B for the floppy controller. I can disable the L2 cache and get it to behave like a much slower machine making it compatible with tools like LIFUTIL.

Dave

[Gerry Schultz]

Quick followup. I opened the hpplus.zip and both files have a TXT filetype. I'm assuming they should be the SYS filetype and you changed it to get past antvirus software.

Thank you for making these available,

Gerry

[Michael Fehlhammer]

(10-07-2014 07:56 PM)Gerry Schultz Wrote:  Quick followup. I opened the hpplus.zip and both files have a TXT filetype. I'm assuming they should be the SYS filetype and you changed it to get past antvirus software.
Gerry

Sorry, I forgot to mention that.
You are exactly right, complaints of antivirus software built into email clients were the reason for renaming .sys to .txt!