phaedrus@eneevax.UUCP (03/05/84)
Does anyone have any opinions/info on the HP 150, HP 200
micros? Is the lack of talk an ominous sign or what?
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From the contorted brain, and the rotted body of THE SOPHIST
ARPA: phaedrus%eneevax%umcp-cs@CSNet-Relay
UUCP: {seismo,allegra,brl-bmd}!umcp-cs!eneevax!phaedrusBILLW%sri-kl@sri-unix.UUCP (03/10/84)
Ah yes. HP computers. Well, im currently doing some consulting for HP, and have an HP120 and an HP150 at my disposal, and had a Nomad (HPs portable, unanounced, so I cant talk about it (16x80 LCD display!)). The HP120: I beleive this is being discontinued. Stay away from it regardless, as the dual process architecture seems to make anything delaing with the display incredibly complex and slow. The HP150: This is the 8088 (8 Mhz) MSDOS computer with the touch screen that you see advertised on TV. Its actually rather neat. It does not make any attempt to be IBMPC compatable beyond MSDOS. The programmer documentation has not yet been released. It does not look like technical documentation will ever be released. As i am supposed to be programming the beast, I got preliminary ISV documentation (hot off the laser printer). Aside from the mistakes it has, here are some interesting points: The two serial interupt ports are interupt driven, and have 256 character buffers. Communications parameters (speed, stop bits, etc) are NOT changeable from a user program. They havent even told HP programmers how this is done. there philosophy is that the configuration menus are always available, and they should be used to change the configuration (they are available even from within programs). I think this is silly. Oh well. configuration, time/date, etc is stored in battery powered ram. It seems to be possible to put stuff in this ram that will prevent the computer from booting properly. I consider this a bug. Display manipuation (390*512 graphics, 24x80 text, "softkey area", touch screen, keyboard strangness) is done through "AGIOS" (Alhpa Grahpics IO System). AGIOS is pretty powerful. Screens can be updated essentially instantly. Note that the graphics and text screens are independent, either or both can be displayed at the same time. Several character sets are available on the alphanumeric screen: Roman, Italics, Bold, Math, Line drawing. the graphics text characters are re-definable, and use vector lists, so as to be scaleable, etc. HP has the weirdest implementation of screen attributes that I've ever seen, but the 150 is consistant with HP terminals. attributes include: Half intensity, Reverse video, blink, underline, and non-display, I think. With "security" on or off. Whatever that does. (probably something with forms). Keyboard: The keyboard has good feel, with keyclick that can be turned off if desired. Some of the keys are in really weird places (a `~ key is next to 1, where escape should be. DELete is SHIFT (!?) ESCAPE, which is just above the left hand shift keys. This arrangment is horrible for TOPS20. 12 Function keys (8 in the HP tradition, labled on lines 25-26 of the screen), numeric/graphics keypad. Misc cursor and editing keys. Using AGIOS, "special" keys may be set to be ignored, beep, function normally, or transmit a keycode. Keycode mode causes each key typed to send four bytes of data to the user program (1 byte= source device, 1 byte flag bits (which shift keys, for example), 2 bytes for the actual data (one one is used)). Keys autorepeat, which cannot be turned off, but you can detect with codes are caused by repeat rather than an initial keypress from one of those flag bits. Touch screen: has many modes. Basically, you can use AGIOS to define screen regions that act like keys (ie: transmit a string, or keycode), or you can sense a direct XY position. Touchscreen data looks like it comes from the keyboard, but the "source device" byte is different. Seperate data can be returned from touching and "releasing". The screen is a little slow, you can move your finger quite a distance without activating intermediate screen positions. I suppose that this is a "feature". The touch screen resoution is low (14*30?) OK for menus, but probably not for graphics without additional hacking. Touching the function key labels at the bottom of the screen is equivilent to typing the corosponding function key, regarless of touch modes used on the rest of the screen. (at least when the labels are displayed...) Function keys: There are actually several sets of function keys available at any one time: system function keys that allow you to change configurations and things, user function keys that can be programed using escape sequences, and applications function keys that can be read using AGIOS and keycode mode. This typically works quite nicely. disks: the units I have have the 3.5 inch hard plastic coated disks, which hold 250K (except on a MacIntosh). These have automatic shutters, and are very nice to carry around, although they seem quite a bit slower than 5.25" floppies. The 15Mb Hard disk also seems slower than it should be. (perhaps this is because they are interfaced via HPIB/IEEE488 bus. (how to make a cheap disk expensive!)) Software: Well..... HP seems to be concentrating on "user friendly" applications software rather than programmer software. Things like DBASE2 and Lotus all run fine. HP has a "friendly" editor call MemoMaker that is quite horrible. (memory limited, slow, must use cursor/function keys). On the other hand, whoever did WordStar for the HP did and very good job. Function keys, cursor keys, even the touch screen work the way you would expect. I have the Microsoft assembler, which works fine (and faster than on an IBM), and Lattice (uSoft?) "C", which I havent tried. There is also a Basic that I havent tried. MSDOS only programs are supposed to work unchanged. A touch front-end called PAM can be used to run applications, and provides a convenient method of installing new software on a users disk. Communications: The terminal emulates the HP2761 (?) termial, and you can also get it to do things with escape sequences. The 150 will emulate a terminal at up to 19.2K baud without any special software packages. (I dont know whether it WORKs that fast, but such a speed may be SET). Xon/Xoff flow control is supposed to be settable for both transmit and receive pacing, although I have seen some indications that perhaps it doesnt work perfectly. HP ETX/ACK handshaking also works. HP supplies a program called DSNLink, which does autologin type things, along with text transfer, and also a protocol transfer to other things (including large HP computers) running a compatable computer. MSDOS KERMIT has been modified to run on the 150, and seems to work fine. The ISV documentation implies tha MODEM/XMODEM is available, but I havent seen the program anyplace. "Any Day Now", I suppose... I can probably answer any detailed technical questions anyone has. My overall impression is quite favorable, although I hope HP gives up and decides to release full technical documentation the way DEC was forced to do on their PC line. Bill Westfield