cc.fdc@COLUMBIA-20.ARPA (01/25/84)
From: Frank da Cruz <cc.fdc@COLUMBIA-20.ARPA> Does anyone have technical information about the HP-150? We just received some of these systems, but there is no technical documentation, no assembler, no DDT, etc. We need to adapt MS DOS (formerly IBM PC) KERMIT to run on this system, so we have to find out the details of serial i/o, interrupts, and so forth. Here's a not-too-technical review: HP-150 First Impressions ------------------------ (This review is from Ken Rossman of Columbia University, based on a day's novice-user-level experience with the system.) The HP-150 is a new 8088-based MS DOS microcomputer from Hewlett-Packard. It's a grey and white box approximately a foot wide, a foot high, and a foot deep. This houses both the processor and the display. Underneath sits a dual 3.5" flexible-disk drive. The keyboard is white with grey keys, and is another in the series of ultra thin lightweight micro keyboards with several misplaced keys (see below) that are current the trend. The display is a small 8 inch (diagonal) green phosphor (short persistence) tube. The characters and graphics are sharp and crisp, but because of the size of the screen and the fact that it is a full 80x24 characters, it can be hard to read at a distance of more than four feet or so. The unique feature of the HP 150 is a "touch screen" that can be programmed to detect when and where you place your finger (or any object, really) on the screen. The HP demos use this feature extensively in iconographic "touch menus" and graphics applications. The "touch sensitivity" feature is actually accomplished via rows of optical sensors running all along the sides of the screen, so you don't actually have to touch the screen and smudge it up -- you need only bring your finger close to the screen (and, of course, you don't actually have to use your finger either). There are actually 23x40 separately addressable points on the touch screen, making the screen a fairly flexible low-resolution input device -- good for menus and coarse graphics input, but not well suited to text editing. There is audio feedback when you make contact, and response is quite snappy. The processor is an 8 MHz 8088 (IBM and DEC PC processors run at about 4.8 MHz). There are no internal program ROMs (such as a BASIC ROM, for example). If no disks are loaded at power-up or at the time you request a reboot (control- shift-reset), the HP 150 automatically goes into terminal mode, emulating the HP-2623 graphics terminal including HP-2621 alphanumeric terminal compatibility and the full HP-2623 512x390 bit-mapped graphics screen, plus all related hardware functions. The terminal mode also includes smooth scroll, which the HP-2623 does not. The terminal emulator mode is supposed to be able to clock 19.2K baud, but I found that it seemed to lose characters now and then at speeds above 4800 baud, even with XON/XOFF enabled. When booting off of the supplied system/demo disk, MS DOS is loaded initially, but it automatically searches any disks it finds for special HP format applications programs, and runs those if found. In the case of the HP system/demo disk, the system automatically chains over to an HP general utility program known as PAM, (Personal Applications Manager). PAM is a menu-driven general top-level shell, which automatically lists any of the known utilities it finds on the ready disks, so that any of these utilities can be selected as a menu item. In addition, along the bottom of the screen is the "standard" 8 block HP mode line, from which you can select PAM functions (either by touching the screen or typing a keyword), such as a general help printout, the terminal emulator, a file system utility (menu driven), or a mode to set the system date/time. A nice feature of this scheme is that I was able to pop back and forth between PAM and the terminal emulator as I wrote this paragraph, so I could write a little bit in EMACS, pop back and look at PAM's screen, and pop back to write some more. The keyboard uses white and two shades of grey to visually separate the various different function keys from the standard typewriter keys. Red and blue lettering also differentiates shifted and nonshifted key functions. The touch is fairly nice -- very light, virtually no resistance, and has key click, which can be disabled. RETURN is a double-sized key and is placed fairly comfortably on the right where the pinky (almost) naturally falls. The control key sits over on the left pretty much where it ought to be, but as HP tends to do with all of their other terminals that I've used, there is a CAPS toggle key just to the left of the control key, which I tend to hit all too often. And if the CAPS key is perhaps a little too available, the ESC/DEL key is very UNavailable, being down on the lower left. There is a single-quote-tilde key where I would have expected the ESC key to be (at the upper left corner). I really had a lot of trouble with this when using the HP 150 as a terminal, and ended up programming the quote/tilde key to be escape (in EMACS, not on the local hardware). The shift keys are fairly well placed, and don't have keys below them, as do many similar micro keyboards (they DO have keys to the outside, which I felt at times I might almost slop over onto, but haven't managed to yet). By the way, the shift and control keys click when you hit them, just like the other keys, which tended to make me think I had actually typed a character by accident when only hitting a shift or control key by itself. This was the first time I had ever seen or used the new 3.5" disks, and I was very impressed with them. A sliding metal piece covers the cutout where the read/write head moves to read the media. The drive opens and closes this door itself, so that when the disk is out of the drive, the door is always closed, thus protecting the media. The full working capacity of a single disk is roughly 280K bytes, so although the disks are physically small, you can pack a decent amount of information on them. When in operation, the unit is fairly quiet. Only the sound of a small fan in the back of the main unit, and the occasional click of the disks is heard (of course, there is also the key click, which is fairly quiet also, and an occasional bell here and there). Two RS-232 ports come standard built into the back of the main unit, along with an HP-IB interface jack, which peripherals are daisy-chained onto. Currently available peripherals include: printers, pen plotters, hard disks, and, of course, additional flexible-disk drives. The printer is built in to the system unit, fitting behind the CRT (we don't have our printer yet). Up to 7 peripherals can be daisy-chained onto the HP-IB bus at once. Applications software is somewhat limited, as is to be expected with a new product. The 150 comes with WordStar, VisiCalc, and graphics. However, unless we missed something, there was no assembler or DDT, and apparently no other programming language, even Basic. Furthermore, there was little or nothing in the way of technical documentation. The HP-150, like most other recent entries in its class, is aimed at the IBM PC. To my mind, it seems to win out in many categories. Standard features like the touch screen, monochrome graphics, 2623 terminal emulation (with its separate alphanumeric and graphics screen memories), two standard serial ports, an HP device bus, two 3.5" disks, and solid HP materials and workmanship tend to edge the HP 150 ahead of the IBM PC in terms of standard features. The ability to switch between terminal emulation and computing without rebooting and losing your current environment is a very attractive feature, as is the ability to use the graphics both locally and from mainframe graphics packages. On the other hand, the IBM PC has the built-in ROM Basic, a larger screen, an army of companies building hardware and software for it, and an enormous market advantage. - Ken Rossman, Columbia University Center for Computing Activities -------