New member - have 9830/9866 and 9845

[Lee White]

I am new here. I am in the USA - Texas now, moving to Ohio soon. I was an engineer at HP Loveland CPD in the early/mid 70's and worked on the 9830/9866 and 9845. Any former HPites from back then on here?

I have recently acquired a 9830A, 9866A, 9866B, 9845A, and a 9845B. The 9830A/9866A does something but has problems - the rest are all DEAD! It would be nice to have a 9830B too.

Goal is to bring them all to life - repair them to full functionality - and then fix them up cosmetically. I am going to start with the 9830A/9866A.

Anyone have any spare parts for these machines - in particular the option ROM cartridges (bad or empty is OK). I am pretty sure I still have what were called the "In House ROM" chips. These were one offs that were used to develop software for the 9830 and they were highly restricted to the software development team. I need something to put them on so I can see if they are any good. Some Cherry key switches - some of mine are bad or broken. A tape cassette or parts and tapes for the 9830? Printer interface cable for the 9830B/9866B? HPIB interface?

I may still have an original basic program listing for the Starwars game for the 9830/9866 in my files somewhere. If some one else has it, a copy would be nice. Stayed up all night playing it more than once.

Also, I probably paid way too much for these dead ones - so what is the bad news - how much is a reasonable price for complete but dead machines these days?

Anyone know if the 9830 or 9845 can be made to talk to the 9133H through the HPIB interface and if the 9830 or 9845 can use the SS/80 command set?

[Paul Dale]

Welcome!

I can't help with any of these machines never having seen one in person.


Pauli

[Paul Berger (Canada)]

(06-26-2018 12:09 AM)Lee White Wrote:  I am new here. I am in the USA - Texas now, moving to Ohio soon. I was an engineer at HP Loveland CPD in the early/mid 70's and worked on the 9830/9866 and 9845. Any former HPites from back then on here?

I have recently acquired a 9830A, 9866A, 9866B, 9845A, and a 9845B. The 9830A/9866A does something but has problems - the rest are all DEAD! It would be nice to have a 9830B too.

Goal is to bring them all to life - repair them to full functionality - and then fix them up cosmetically. I am going to start with the 9830A/9866A.

Anyone have any spare parts for these machines - in particular the option ROM cartridges (bad or empty is OK). I am pretty sure I still have what were called the "In House ROM" chips. These were one offs that were used to develop software for the 9830 and they were highly restricted to the software development team. I need something to put them on so I can see if they are any good. Some Cherry key switches - some of mine are bad or broken. A tape cassette or parts and tapes for the 9830? Printer interface cable for the 9830B/9866B? HPIB interface?

I may still have an original basic program listing for the Starwars game for the 9830/9866 in my files somewhere. If some one else has it, a copy would be nice. Stayed up all night playing it more than once.

Also, I probably paid way too much for these dead ones - so what is the bad news - how much is a reasonable price for complete but dead machines these days?

Anyone know if the 9830 or 9845 can be made to talk to the 9133H through the HPIB interface and if the 9830 or 9845 can use the SS/80 command set?

All things 9845 can be found at hp9845.net it is a really great site for 9845 information and also a really useful HPIB storage emulation program, HPDrive.

You may want to ask for assistance / parts on the groups.io VintHPcom group lots of us owners of old HP computers hang around there.

Not sure about the 9830 but the mass storage ROM on 9845 only supported Amigo but Structured Software Systems (SSS) produced a ROM that expanded storage support to include some SS/80 devices but not sure is 9133H was included, but IMHO with a flat file system and only 6 character file names I don't see hard disks as being really practical unless you need large files. I mostly use a 9895 8" diskette unit with my 9835A and 9835Ts but also have a 9885M. The SSS ROM supports most of the 3.5" diskette units as well. There is an image of the ROM on hp9845.net but I am not sure how you might interface something like EPROMs to a 9845, if I had one I would have already done that as I did for my 9835A, 9825, and series 80 machines.

Edit: You can also find lots of info at hpmuseum.net

Paul.