9114B and HP-41 HP75C

[Dave Frederickson]

The Vintage PC
For working with LIF discs I would define a truely vintage PC as one that can run the HP utility LIFUTIL. LIFUTIL was developed in the day of 16 MHz CPU's and the code is highly hardware timing dependent making it difficult to duplicate on modern hardware. LIFUTIL is the only program I've seen that can format a LIF disc on a PC's floppy drive.
http://ftp.ftp.hpmuseum.org/lif/lifutil/

What I have is a 450 MHz PII with an Adaptec HD/FD controller and 1.44Mb and 1.2Mb FDD's. The Adaptec FD controller is one that passes the required data rates for LIF discs per Dave Dunfield's testfdc utility.
http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/img47321/testfdc.zip

The Registry lists the test results for a multitude of vintage controllers.
http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/img47321/pcfdc.txt

With this configuration I can boot the PC to DOS and disable the L2 cache with a 3rd party utility and make the thing run at a snails pace, compatible with LIFUTIL.

Or I can boot Win98SE and run some of the more modern LIF utilities like HPDir.
https://www.hp9845.net/9845/projects/hpdir/

The motherboard's ISA slots also allow me to plug in the 82973A HP-IL Interface Card for even more fun.