Original HP 3000 brochure

[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