HP82169A usefull in anno 2022?

[Martin Hepperle]

Specific software COULD be written - whether it SHOULD be written is a philosophical question.

In principle, only the HP 110 and the Serie-80 with EMS ROM can directly use the SS/80 drives like the 7958.
You could use any other calculator/computer to read and write sectors of a 7958 and similar drive.
This requires a program which does a few things:

• read the directory,
• find out the starting sector and the file length,
• read the appropriate sectors and store the result somewhere in the computer.
  

Similarly for writing, where one would also have to include locating free space in the directory and on the disk, updating the directory entry and writing the actual data.
Initializing a disc would come next.

Each operation requires to follow the SS/80 protocol, which is a 3-phase transaction scheme (Command, Execute, Status). This is a bit more complex than the simpler Filbert way.

All this could be done with a medium sized, special program. Such a program could be used for specific applications. The 9114 is a good candidate for experimentation, because it understands both protocols.

For a real integration into the system, you would have to hook into the system via a LEX file or BPGM, find out whether the target device is a SS/80 device, if not, use the previous system routines, otherwise use your new routines.
Thus, the hook would duplicate all mass storage keywords or you would have to hook one layer below the keyword level into the system, if this is possible.

The effort is not small and I am not sure whether you can really make good use of a 170 MB hard disk on a HP-71 or HP-75. Usually a capacity of 1-5 MB would be enough for these small systems.

I find that going through the HP-IL <-> HP-IB converter slows disc access down by a large amount. I tried this with an HP Portable Plus. It works, but is rather slow. Much slower than using the link via HP-IL to a 9114 or a PIL-Box.

I have attached the file from HP-75 with HP-9114 using SS/80 in case you cannot access the groups.io file.

Martin