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HP 9816 with dual floppy drive

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maxfli

Experienced Member
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Oct 21, 2012
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179
I have seen for sale a HP 9816 and was woundering other than the floppy drive and printers, what other peripherals are available for the unit?
 
HP made a ton of GPIB peripherals that were widely compatible across their computer lines, and since GPIB = IEEE-488 the computers can also be interfaced directly to all kinds of obscure industrial and lab equipment. So... I guess the question would be "what are you hoping to interface to it?".

These things definitely were not "home computers", of course. You'll probably come up kind of dry looking for joysticks...
 
Eudimorphodon said:
HP made a ton of GPIB peripherals that were widely compatible across their computer lines, and since GPIB = IEEE-488 the computers can also be interfaced directly to all kinds of obscure industrial and lab equipment. So... I guess the question would be "what are you hoping to interface to it?".

These things definitely were not "home computers", of course. You'll probably come up kind of dry looking for joysticks...
Click to expand...
Looking for hard drives, tape drives and networking type equipment.
 
Browsing around there will get you an idea. Most peripherals with a GPIB bus can be made to work with this machine. It also has an internal expansion slot that at least a third party made an Ethernet card for, but good luck finding one. (It also doesn't help that the 9816 is the "baby" of the lot and only has one externally accessible expansion slot, so even if you find some DIO cards with interesting I/O features you get to choose *one*.)

That said, it's worth mentioning that these machines were pretty niche. They were really designed to just run custom BASIC or PASCAL programs to do "industrial/lab" things with and there's practically no "interesting" software available for them. It's probably only a good investment if you *want* for some reason to learn Rocky Mountain BASIC or otherwise do your own thing.
 
What industrial and lab equipment did they interface with?
 
maxfli said:
Looking for hard drives, tape drives and networking type equipment.
Click to expand...
There's definitely a version of the HP 7970 tape drive with a GPIB interface. I have a 14 inch hard drive here with a GPIB interface. And, of course, the usual printers, plotters, and measurement equipment.
 
Would the hard drive from a 300 series machine work with the 9816 if it has hp-ib?
 
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