[Simh] HP 2100/1000 A-series

[Ken Cornetet]

As far as peripherals, the A series used HP-IB (HP's version of IEEE 488) interface for interfacing with most devices including printers, plotters, tape drives and disks. These devices were referred to as "Amigo" and "CS-80" (command-set 80 - I have no idea what the 80 stood for). I *think* Amigo was an older spec perhaps for disk drives only, and CS-80 was a later general command set.

AFAIK, all of the HP-IB devices that were supported on the A series were also supported on the M/E/F series, so if someone does an A series emulator with HP-IB support, it would be beneficial port that code to the M/E/F emulator.

On the other hand, if someone does an A series emulator, the HP-IB devices are the least important. The more interesting devices were the SCSI interface, mux, and Ethernet. The only thing you'd really need HP-IB for would be a line printer.

As a side note, I seem to have stuck in the back of my mind that the HP specials division had an ARCnet board available for the M/E/F series. Does anyone know if this is true?

-----Original Message-----
From: Simh [mailto:simh-bounces at trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Holger Veit
Sent: Monday, June 08, 2015 3:21 AM
To: simh at trailing-edge.com
Subject: Re: [Simh] HP 2100/1000 A-series

Am 07.06.2015 um 05:40 schrieb J. David Bryan:
> On Saturday, June 6, 2015 at 21:44, Cory Smelosky wrote:
>
>> It seems there's no current SIMH support for the HP 1000 A-series 
>> system (A900, A990, A600 et cetera) meaning RTE-A (with the ARPA/1000 
>> software!) is unfortunately out.
> That's correct.
>
>
>> Looks like enough docs for at least some of the later ones are up on 
>> Bitsavers...any plans for implementing these missing models?
> Holger Veit <holger.veit at iais.fraunhofer.de> had been looking into 
> doing a SIMH A-Series simulator several years ago, but I've not heard 
> what progress he made, if any.
>
> Regrettably, relatively little of the existing HP 1000 M/E/F-Series 
> simulator could be leveraged for an A-Series simulator.  The base set 
> instructions are the same, although the I/O instructions and I/O 
> structure are entirely different, and there are a number of new 
> instructions.  Also, essentially none of the M/E/F peripherals (disc, 
> tape, terminal multiplexers, line printers) were supported on the 
> A-Series, so a whole new set of peripheral simulators would have to be 
> written.  An off-the-cuff guess would be that reusing the base set 
> would cover maybe 20% of the full simulator code.  The other 80% would have to be written from scratch.
>
> On the plus side, the full RTE-A sources, the A-Series microcode, and 
> several RTE-A binary releases are available in the HP 1000 Software 
> Collection on Bitsavers, so the job is by no means impossible.
JDB summarizes the problem quite precisely.

After the microcode ROM stuff, JDB and I added to the HP1000 system, I infact looked at the A series, to possibly extend the simulator with "the missing A instructions". It turned out that the A series is not only a class of quite different systems with entirely different properties but also with a completely new I/O system (based on a monolithic chip). It is a new platform. Workload prevented me from following this further, but I am still attracted by such a simulator, mainly because of the microcode which is well documented for some of the models, as well as for RTE-A itself which is a technological progress to the older RTE-IV/6VM systems.

On the documentation side, the I/O chip is well documented, however the various peripherals that are built around it are less described. That time I didn't find a complete enough set to combine a useful A hardware. The CPU part itself is likely the smallest problem even if I'd start this from scratch as well (as a plain microcode interpreter) rather than lifing the base instructions from the HP1000 emulator.

The things are not forgotten, as well as the PDQ3 and Sage-II/IV things
- it's just the general problem that the day is limited to 24h.

--
Holger