HP 150 A/B Touchscreen Disks?

[Martin Hepperle]

I am quite sure that a few of you also have a HP 150 at home.

Recently I performed some maintenance on HP 9133 hard disk units and for this I used a HP 150 and a more recent HP 150 II.
I used disk images created from the TD0 files provided by the HP-Museum in Australia.
These comprise an early revision "A" of the operating system with MS-DOS 2.01 and a revision "E" with MS-DOS 3.2.
While the latter is more useful, it would be interesting to also locate copies of other revisions "B", "C", and, "D". Starting with "B" the MS-DOS Version should be 2.11.

If you still have original system diskettes for your HP 150, could you have a look and see, whether these carry a revision number other than "A.nn.nn" or "E.nn.nn" on their label?
If so, could you make copies with Teledisk or a similar tool?

(The HP-150 system came with 3 disks: "SYSTEM", "APPLICATIONS" "UTILITIES")

Thanks for looking,
Martin

PS: The HP calculator program also available in form of a TD0 image file should contain emulation of the 11C, 12C, 15C and, 16C, but the image file available on the HP-Museum.net web site only has the 12C emulation. So if you happen to have a disk with this software...

[Martin Hepperle]

... still setting up my system ...

The HPMuseum.net has a copy of Graphics-Gallery (Drawing/Charting) but two of the disk images seem to be broken. I recreated the disks and these to cannot be read in several HP 91xx disk drives. All other disks work, so I assume that the images or the original disks are damaged.
I was able to install a working copy of Drawing Gallery but I cannot copy the driver for the NPLPS graphics Video-Show device and some other additional files.

Maybe someone has a copy of the original disks of LIBRARY-MASTER and UTILITY-MASTER and could create an image file, e.g. with Teledisk 2.16?

Thanks for looking,
Martin

[Maximilian Hohmann]

Hallo Martin,

I attach phots 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 MacBiook. 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

[twoweims]

I am also looking for some HP-150 System Disks.

I recently acquired a very nice HP-150/HP-9121. They are in perfect physical condition.
The Screen is sharp and bright with no burn-in.
It has the full 640k of RAM and passes the RAM test on all banks.
It passes the POST.
All of the keys on the keyboard work.
The touchscreen is completely working.

The 9121 drive appears to work. The lights come on at the appropriate times. The drives spin-up. The “0” drive tries to read from an inappropriately formatted disk when attempting to boot.

I do not have a computer with a floppy drive that can run DOS so I can't use TeleDisk to create disks from the HP Computer Museum Images.

Is there anyone able and willing to create a set of system disks for me so I can do some further testing?

Thanks!

[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

[Dave Frederickson]

(10-11-2020 02:38 PM)twoweims Wrote:  I do not have a computer with a floppy drive that can run DOS so I can't use TeleDisk to create disks from the HP Computer Museum Images.

I can make the discs for you.

I also have some drivers from Sydex (TeleDisk) that allow you to read/write/format HP-150 discs on a PC.

Email me.

Dave

[twoweims]

Thank You, Dave!

e-mail sent

[twoweims]

   

It Works!
Thank You Dave!