HP 150 A/B Touchscreen Disks?

[Martin Hepperle]

(09-27-2020 05:05 PM)Maximilian Hohmann Wrote:  Hallo Martin,

I attach photos of all the original HP-150 floppies that I still have (or managed to find under heaps of trash). I have no idea if they are still readable, because both my HP-150 as well as the disk drive are broken. All I have now for reading floppies is an USB drive connected to my MacBook. I doubt that it can read those HP single sided disks.
Some years ago I sent the drive to one of our fellow forum members who attempted to retrieve some files from it, but, as far as I know, failed. He still has the drive or disposed of it in the meantime.

I also have a box full of hand-labeled disks, including the gallery series (drafting and charting gallery). This is because I bought my HP 150 from an HP employee ca. 1987 or 89 who "forgot" to delete the software from the hard drive when he gave me the computer (that software was crazily expensive then, nothing under 4-figure price tags). However he handed me all the manuals which fill a large cardboard box ("Umzugskarton").

If you can make anything of it, I would be happy to send you either individual floppies or the whole box. Just let me know. Or if you know a way how I can possibly read them on my Macintosh I will try that as well.

Regards
Max
...

Max,

thank you for the photos. Most of the software seems to be available, but not the German versions. I will compare with the HP-Museum site.

You will not be able to read these disks easily with a modern system, because they use an unusual sector size of 256 bytes which is perfectly legal as a MS-DOS format, but all IBM-PC compatibles and modern MS-DOS as well as USB drives use 512 byte or larger sectors.
One can read them with a older PC system of the Windows 95-98 era with a built-in 3.5" diskette drive and a suitable hardware controller (not all seem to work ) and software like Teledisk to make images.

One can also use a HP 150 with MS-DOS 3.2 to read the old HP 256-byte-sector disks and write them to MS-DOS 512-byte-sector formatted 720 KB DS/DD disks (on the same system). This works e.g. with a 9133 and also with 9122 disk drives. But not with the initial MS-DOS 2.11.
During the last days I have done this quite a few times to bring individual files to my modern PC (via USB drive).

In the meantime I also wrote an ugly Python script to extract individual files from a raw diskette image file. This allowed me to reconstruct one of the non-working (for me) Graphing Gallery diskettes from the HP-Museum site.

Speaking of Graphing/Charting/Drawing Gallery: it would be interesting to have the installation disks for the Revision B.03.00 or later - not sure whether you have noted that detail on your hand labeled disks?

The German Word/150 would be interesting to preserve before the disks loose their oxide layer. Also the Expanded memory driver disk, even if I don't have such a board.

If you lend me your disks, I can have a look at them to see what is recoverable.

Maybe you have to travel to BWE/EDVE ?

Martin