Upon further study of the service manual, I was not interpreting the the selt-test errors displayed on the CRT properly. They are a 16 bit code which must be compared against a table that breaks down each problem area. See page 88 and page 90 in the HP 150 service manual. The codes 1000, 1004, 100C and 000C make sense now. The first 1 points to the touch screen issue and the xxxC or xxx4 all point to RAM issues (which turned out to be the expansion RAM board.) The LEDs must always be decoded to read the proper error code from the machine. Live and learn! HP 150 service manual: www.bitsavers.org/pdf/hp/hp150/45625-90001_HP-150_Technical_Manual_May84.pdf
That was excellent problem solving. It shows how dead ends and false assumptions can lead you in the wrong direction, but using common sense and observation can keep you progressing forward.
You've taken away my chance to comment that those error codes clearly mean "Fault with error reporting system". Heh. Anyway, this must be one of your very best repairs yet, considering the lack of documentation and that tricky board.
Maybe it's just me but I can't figure out which pages you mean. I opened that link and tried PDF page 88, nope. 8-8? Nope. *-88? Doesn't exist. Anyone able to find it?
In High School (1986) I worked as a security guard at HP in Cupertino. We had this machine controlling our security center. Its touch screens would change the monitors (Televisions) on the wall to the channels we needed to view. If someone didn't access a door correctly, the machine would register the alarm and allow us to switch the camera, and log the alarm details all with touch. Given the year, it was such an amazing piece of integration. It had the printer installed that would Print both the normal alarms, but could also print the CRT image from the selected TV. The control and connectivity for this single screen was and still is the most heavy integration of serial control I have ever seen. Hundreds of HID readers attached to a server, and those servers had door lock controls managed by the same machine running the monitors, the alarms and the daily logs. Amazing for its time. Think DBase 4 with legs.
this was also my first year of seeing 3d graphics running on some development prototype display of a car rotating in air, it was a dodge Charger Shelby graphic picture rendered in 3d and it was eye candy never seen in the bay area. They also had a Ink "Plotter" that was huge but could print in color! like an artist, it would spin a color pallet of ink jars, pick the pen and like modern 3d printers, it would draw using vectors. I would say I was amazed, but now I think I spent too many hours wasted as a youth. HP security officer (AKA globe security) 1986 - 1989
@@trs-80fanclub12 same time, I had a Highschool buddy who's dad was sales director of HP Germany. You can imagine the stuff this guy had in his basement... it was amazing. He sourced HP-11 calculators for his inner circle at school, have mine still, running like new. Programmable calculators weren't allowed to use in school, but the teachers turned a blind eye because they were so impressed that we could handle RPN.
It was nice to see the HP-150 once again. I did the port of MS-DOS for the HP-150 back when I worked for HP (plus a custom version of WordStar for the 150 as well). People might ask why the HP 150 was not IBM PC compatible. The IBM-PC was released in August 1981 and wasn't shipped in large quantities for months. It wasn't clear for the first half of 1982 that the whole IBM-PC; hardware, BIOS, and PC-DOS (MS_DOS), would become the standard, not just MS-DOS. What made it the standard was the large amount of computer software that was available for the IBM-PC that bypassed PC-DOS and accessed the BIOS and the hardware directly. In a way it was the fact that PC-DOS was really a poor operating system that caused the standard to be more than just the PC-DOS interface. There were some software titles available on the day the PC was released but it took about a year for the software base to expand to the point that the PC had become the defactor standard. It wasn't until late 1982 that IBM-PC compatibles, like the Eagle PC, started to appear. There were not just technological challenges making an IBM-PC compatible. There were legal issues too since the standard included the BIOS interface. Eagle Computer just copied the IBM-PC ROM and tried to argue that it wasn't copyright infringement because the ROM was hardware. Well,,,,,,, it was copyright infringement , and the legal challenges destroyed Eagle Computer. We were in the planning stages of the HP-150 well before it was determined the IBM-PC was the new standard. Some early startups, like Gavalin Computer, used up their entire financing only to release a non-IBM-PC compatible product at about the same time it was becoming clear that IBM-PC compatibility was a requirement. Gavalin never recovered. HP had a large customer base and was able to make the HP-150 a successful even without PC compatibility. The HP-150 got a mention in the TV series "Halt and Catch Fire". As the main characters of the show are walking through the 1983 Consumer Electronics Show one of the characters says something like "Hey, did you see that touch screen computer from HP". I enjoyed hearing that.
HP was A Giant Company And Could Absorb the Losses Of Their NON DOS Machines!! They Had their Copy Machines Fax Machines etc To fall back on! That Is What kept HP from Biting The Dust With This Blunder! It Did not take them long to figure out MS-DOS Was The New Standard! I Had a HP Tape Recorder Back In The Late 70's Then A HP PC In the 90's! We Had A IBM PCjr In The 80's! I have owned dozens of good old HP PC,s Since that time But Eventually Migrated To DELL after I aided In the Construction Of Their Nashville TN Plant! I Have a 15 Year Old Dell with a Q6600 CPU That I Still Use as A Media Server! Had to replace the power supply 6 years ago and Upgrades the ram and SSD but it still is responsive as any of the cheap PC's out there Today! Running Linux Not The MALWARE/SPYWARE That Windows Has Become Since The Early Win7 Release!
This probably was one of the best products you could get as a professional back then, the level of integration was ahead of its time because we didn't see similar products from IBM until 5 years later. HP always gave me the impression they are behind the scenes doing their professional focused products very well but they had problems with the commercial ones. This is on my perspective on have been a salesman for the company about 15 years ago, their public commercial PC products were a little of a clown show withe very dubious decisions. Later I got into IT and now I'm working in mainframe and learned what they are about really. All their professional products are top notch, I have owned several office HP laptops and they are the best I tried, best ergonomics, durability, service, I even bought them second hand for relatives and they still kick strong. They are the one of the few who offer the 6 del/ins/home/end/pgup/pgdn row in 14 and less inches laptops, which they are absolutely mandatory for my work. I had to work with a similar Dell for a while and asked for an HP replacement because it just wrecked my workflow. Those are the good details.
@@kevinlsims7330What are you talking about? HP didn't make copy and fax machines, at least not in any significant quantity back then. The printers and plotters they made were designed to be used with their test equipment, just like their computers. Their main business was test equipment and computers of various sizes. The LaserJet and all that came later. Also, it's really, really not necessary to capitalize every single word in a sentence, it comes off as really obnoxious and difficult to read .... Also, if you read what the original commenter said (who actually worked for HP and would probably know better)... this wasn't a "blunder", this machine still sold very well because, like their other computers before and after this point, they were designed to be used with HP's test equipment and engineering tools to create custom test and verification setups. So you could have one of these machines connected to a whole rack of HP test equipment on an assembly line, and do extensive testing to make sure your product was working correctly. This was HP's bread and butter during the 70s and 80s. Go check out the HP test equipment catalogues from the 1970s, their computers were listed in there because that was how they viewed their computers first and foremost -- tools to be used with test equipment to automate and log results.
Yes, people don't understand, when IBM gave Microsoft the rights to license to other companies, they fully expected the MS-DOS machines would be mostly incompatible! It was Compaq that really got "full" compatibility as a feature, although the PC 1600 was the first, released in June 1982 by Columbia Data Products, with the Portable, Compaq made $111 million in revenue it's first year. IBM setttled out-of-court with Eagle because Eagle copied the PC BIOS byte for byte. "Halt and Catch Fire" more closely resembles the history of Corona Data Systems, except they also cloned the BIOS and later settled with IBM. I don't know why this association wasn't played up, and they pushed the Compaq reverse engineering angle. The only other similarity was the Texas location.
@1000 Subs with just Playlists Not really sure, all I know is I have a 2005 HP laptop that runs well with no heat issues, and three HP laptops from 2008 and 2013 that have absolutely terrible heat issues (i had to remove the plastic vents over the single tiny cooling fan to get it to stay on during summer this year), and I've had two HP printers fail fairly quickly recently, plus my grandma got an HP printer where the wireless function, which was one of the main selling points, stopped working after a couple days, and when we went to return it, there were two other people in the queue with the same printer. After that, that model of printer was advertised as a USB printer only, with no wireless functionality.
1000 Subs with just Playlists - the Compaq acquisition is what really did it for the consumer stuff, they spun that off to Compaq. If you look at the computers just before and just after that, the difference is obvious. Their enterprise grade stuff is still alright these days.
HP started going down hill when they started having a string of successively worse CEOs who cared more about lining their pockets than actually making good products. it's pretty sad.
@1000 Subs with just Playlists nice username made chuckle! I've seen some really creative ones though so definitely a good one. Story behind it? If there was one?
I did a work/study program while in High School at HP's Colorado Telecommunications Division in Colorado Springs. They had tons of these, mostly used at terminals for a mainframe. Only a few had the thermal printers in the monitors, and those who didn't put tissue boxes in them. It was amusing seeing people pulling Kleenex tissues from the tops of their computers.
Kleenex dispenser! OMG that's too funny. I actually moved the machine off the bench and stored the GPIB cable and mouse in there. It's shockingly handy!
Mine does not have a thermal printer but I have a Thinkjet that now works after replacing the ribbon cable to the print head. It still amazes me you can still get the print cartridges. So I use the top for storing fanfold paper.
Which would have even be more hilarious if someone mistakenly thought the printer was a tissue box. So they hit PRINT... and then proceed to pull the print from the machine and blow their nose with them. For a machine that was intended for mostly scientific purposes, having a built-in thermal printer kind of made sense, though.
I haven't watched anything this riveting since Apollo 13 :) Also that screen and those fonts are absolutely gorgeous and the infrared grid is ingenious. I miss old school HP :(
my dad had one from work (he worked for HP Corporate) and we loved playing with it at home! Brings back memories. I remember printing patterns on the thermo printer on the top as a kid! Was pretty cool. I didn't realize it was optional. I thought the printer was just part of it.
I'd say that's a 10-4 affirmative a good buddy on that one. Also with the compressed air a note with sound when using dust off or or similar ran into this on an old Gateway machine. I was having some issues with it overheating. And in one day it wouldn't even stay on for a few minutes. Popped open the case and sure enough heatsink was packed with dust. A lot of other things as well including the fan. And processor heatsink fan of course. I was using the dust off or similar and I was doing this in my bedroom big mistake one big cloud of dust and I'd use so much I was not feeling good because of the effects of the dust off or whatever it was on me and I was not aware they do that so be careful. Best weapon to do it outside in generals not just with the nature of the stuff but the dust cloud as well just undid all my cleaning for that month it seemed like.
@@aaronbrandenburg2441 I use an air compressor. And do it outside, of course. Best also to wear a mask or respirator, especially if you think mice might have been in there.
The dust was not the main part I was referring to who is actually the the stuff that's used for the dusting spray that I was having problems with there was enough of it in the air that I wasn't feeling so good yeah and got to my respiratory system that was the big part they be running a big fan but I had no idea I was going to need to use that much and didn't know how much dust was in there's heat sinks and everything so vacuum cleaner would not have really done anything for the spray itself but dust maybe but still would have been a real mess. And I did not have time to disconnect everything and get it outside plus it was raining and I had to get back going on something I was doing immediately on the computer so no options other than to do it is there and at that moment sometimes things are like that but learn my lesson about using large quantities of dusting spray in a small size room.
@@stinchjack totally 100% agree if you own it which it seems like apples case s he has said you don't really own it just like software that you don't own and many other things that once you purchase it it should be yours and be able to do what you want with it including having anyone you please to repair it as you can tell I thoroughly agree with the point in full! Just like they say in the maker community if you own it you should be able to take it apart modify it whatever and if it doesn't fit your needs you should be able to modify it the way you want warranty void if removed should be outlawed completely banned but of course companies have to protect their rear end if some like really screw something up but trying to do something past what can be fixed it would fall back on them because of something the user it done to their own equipment I understand that however that should not interfere with reasonable things that someone is doing technically we have the right to repair in some situations however there needs to be legislation that's consumer orientated and protects our rights to our own equipment Etc and Legacy on legislation of what can and cannot be doing like in the case of apple and others so you open it you broke it or you try to fix it sorry no parts for you or you touch a screw we don't touch it no repair for you or sorry you can't program that part your device no longer works we didn't do it you did when actuality that was what the product was designed to do to prevent it from Dean. Buy legitimate repair services or ady hot for assume that would be able to fix something normally companies are so pigheaded that they want you to buy a new device in many cases I think about the song All speakers deliberately at least a first breaking them I'm sure this was not the first taste of this heard of others but can't remember at this time all I've heard about this but this will only continue to happen worse and worse the community needs to get together someway somehow and Soldier on until whoever takes notice and changed the laws to reflect what would work and be reasonable for both sides of things if possible and be able to get things appointed there are ways in which a company could say no to repair if something's jacked up to the point that it would have been unreasonable for a user to do something or a repair got a rolly but yet comforter butts when appropriate and so that people cannot just get a new device because they checked it up and they're not able to in the person tries to pin it on them when it would not be the right thing to happen in a reasonable situation. Butthead yet have rules and legislation that would State exactly what a manufacturer I would or could not do and clear guidelines as to what is appropriate and acceptable in cases such as these and others that both sides could agree on at least as much as possible and work for the good of all that's watch as possible it might be a pipe dream to have this happen but it needs to get a lot better it's just crazy either or just make your project open source and be done with it that might just solve it encourage cell phone repair don't turn it into something that's a death sentence for the device.
Serviceable by HP or a repair shop, not the end user. There’s still a difference of welding it shut to having it easily come apart in a modular fashion.
A very good computer from HP. I used the computer until 2001. I liked that green on the monitor. The sharpness of the writing could be adjusted on the back wall. My monitor had hardware that allowed me to write in Russian. I associated myself with the USSR with various institutions. This gave me access to the most secret connections. Everything with the HP 150. The HP 150 was developed for World War III. It should still be functioning 200 years after a Soviet nuclear strike. Pentagon's secret HP 150 project in the 1970s. If you have an HP 150 you are a lucky person. But you are also a powerful human with the most dangerous computer weapon in the world.
I really appreciate the extra energy and intuitiveness you took into putting and finding the bad RAM chip and detailing your thought process. Thanks for giving this old machine some extra love.
I was a service tech for HP when these came out. We would have a customer get a straw and blow out the holes if we did not want to go out there or were busy. Later HP made a plastic strip that blocked the lower holes from dust, You can also use clear Scotch tape to cover the lower holes and prevent this failure. HP also was making the HP 125 a CPM computer, and a UNIX luggable computer at the same time. The MS-DOS won that battle. Many of these HP-150 computers were used to control HP Lab equipment such as Spectrum analyzers and other test equipment as well as medical equipment because of the HP-IB (IEEE-488) interface. Back in the HP office we connected these to HP 404 MB disk drives for fun. The disk drives were the size of a washing machine. Much of the older HP technology gets scrapped (recycled) as the boards many times had gold traces. At one time Compaq was thinking of licensing the HP thermal printer for their early luggable computers. The licensing never worked out. But Compaq ran their business on the HP 3000 and larger computers.
Your way of diagnosing these problems very much reminds me of how Eric O. of South Maine Auto diagnoses car problems. Very logical approach. Car problems vs. computer problems, yet the way to find the cause or culprit is very much the same. A logic approach: i do this, i expect that to happen, but this happens instead, so that must be wrong. This logical reasoning is also why i very much love watching your videos. It soothes my brain. Thanks, Adrian!
Also: "If I swap this component into that position, does the problem move along with it or does it stay where it was?" Basic problem localization, troubleshooting and jury-rigging skills can get you a very long way as a service engineer.
The HP Machines were extremely popular in Laboratories of all kind. A predecessor, the HP-85 already had a small Printer built in to print out e.g. measuring protocols on the fly. This is why the option was included to put a printer on top, not so silly ;-) HP PCs of this era were build like tanks, I had a AT-compatible early Vectra that ran for 10 years without the slightest failure (same mouse as this 150, by the way...)
Woah! Blast from the past. When I was an undergrad (mid 80s) they had one of these in the main computer lab. It was used as one of the many terminals for the HP3000 system on campus.
Thanks for revisiting the HP-150. Lots of interesting history with this computer. I wrote the HPIB disk driver for the HP-150. As a side note... HP was developing its own operating system for the HP-150 called HPIQ. I probably had the only copy of MS-DOS at HP that I got from Microsoft, but hadn’t done anything with it when a colleague asked to borrow it. HP eventually gave up on inventing its own operating system and switched to MS-DOS.
@@adriansdigitalbasement HPIQ was never released. They got pretty far with it, but in the end... MS-DOS was done and working. HP added a number of applications on top that could leverage the other money makers (like plotters!)
Nice find, Adrian. The design of this thing inside and out is so ridiculously charming. It's almost like in their attempt to make it so convenient and modular, it's kind of over-engineered.
I acquired an HP 150 from a coworker that retired and I was also getting the 1000 code. Thanks to your video, I just blew out the LED holes on the monitor and my error went away too!
Great video! I remember as a kid going with my dad to a Tech Expo in 1984 here in South America and saw this computer being demo'ed by an HP agent in their booth and the crowd went wooow when he touched the screen and menus changed in the display, we thought this product was from the future
The machine is actually very servicable and it is very easy to access once you have proper tools. The sliding boards construction is still very popular in some industrial gear. The idea is that you should have special extension/diagnostic boards that are mostly just direct connections from one side to the other. You plug it into the main interconnect board and plug a board you want to play around with into it. This way your board is just hanging in the air outside the case that gives easy access to both sides and some mechanical stability at the same time. The only real downside of the approach is the amount of high quality connectors and boards and board guides and supporting brackets required is so high that it makes the whole system much heavier and much more expensive than if it was just quickly shoved into a box, screwed up to whatever and hooked up with some wires.
Great problem solving, as always. And I'm really glad you called it "bit 3" instead of "bit 4". lol Yep, it's strange when they don't add better diag code to the BIOS. In assembly, it wouldn't take up much space at all to add a simple 0x00 / 0xFF / 0xAA / 0x55 RAM check, and show which bank has failed. (or a walking-bit test, to determine which bank AND chip had failed.) But HP were a lot like IBM, where the retail cost of the machine meant they didn't too care much about board-level repairs. They obviously saved a bit on the cost of the IC sockets, too.
I remember using a machine like this. The one I used had the thermal printer installed. I never knew that it was NOT IBM compatible, nor did I know that the computer was in the monitor, not with the floppy drives! I first used such a computer back in 1988. It was in an insurance processing company that used an HP 3000 Series III mini computer, which was already ancient. The company used HP terminals along with a very few of these computers, which were still just mostly used as a slightly smarter terminal.
Adrian, I watched this really nice video and stumbled across your daubts, why people route botch-wires identical to their traces. I found these type of fixes myself inside Rohde & Schwarz RF test systems. The reason is very simple: The original traces are too close to the side of the cards and are prone to fail by being mechanically ripped off by the card rails. With conductive assemblies, like the RF tes equipment, there is a risc of shorting things out so close to the case or slides. So they cut the traces and used some botch wire. May be that helps to demystify that double-routing :)
Adrian, this video brought back memories. We used 150s as terminals to an HP3000. I used to take a little ball of Blue-Tak and throw it at the screen and watch the cursor follow the sticky ball as it slowly rolled down the screen. I think some of the monitors had thermal printers on top.
I was hired by HP way back in 1984 as the HP150 expert and even had the ROM source code at one point when I was writing an assembler based Beehive terminal emulator. If you rented a car on the east coast back in then that transaction was done at the airport on a HP150. Later they even offered driving directions where you used the touch screen to touch your map info and got a thermal printout of how to drive there. I never kept any of that hardware as I was always chasing the next fastest computer, but it was fun and HP-HIL was very similar to what would become USB. You could daisy-chain devices off of HP-HIL also.
WOW!!! It's been SO long since I played on that type of system, I really aggravated my uncle (Who owned it) after I systematically tried every available command, ending up on FORMAT... Oh he was annoyed. Pretty cool system, I was blown away by the high resolution monochrome touch display. Even had a modem that he would use to connect to a mainframe at work (He worked at HP as an engineer and helped in e-beam probing bare dies for the PA/RISC processors during test and troubleshooting).
I mean, all the business stuff still seems fine, for now anyway. Though, I only have EliteDesk 800 G1 and G2 systems, and a more modern EliteDisplay S270n
Correction grabs tissue from paper exit SWAT for printer on top of computer and cries into the tissue on top of computer and cries into the tissue yeah we're friends in another comment as to what people had use that for a tissue holder seriously. What's build a device to allow you to use a paper towel roll to the front fake drawer of a older kitchen cabinet below the sink the paper towel would pass through with those decorative sloths that was poor ventilation to keep washer from building up under the sink excetera they knew do actually make modern drawers that have a place for paper towels wish they would do the same for tissues be a nice touch for either side of the bathroom. Or kitchen. By the way what the worst ideas ever had somebody say that their house smells like urine next to utility sink their place had a place attached to it that was shared with another Resident turns out there was a urinal like that of a portable toilet accept metal and the hose yes hose ran down took a right angle turn into a Copper hype and Waldo in your utility room running into the laundry machine tubs at first they thought it was an overflow or something else having to do it from the old systems in the house when they first saw it and then later on they realize what the smell was and what was coming out of it needless to say they are no longer sharing a residence they found out they were actually living there illegally and never got any compensation or anyone or anything they should have to even live there they just took it that it was a separate residence until they found out when they brought this up with some other issue when it was brought up turns out they are a lot more space there place quite by accident also not sure why but I had seen something like that except done with a dishwasher tailpiece in the bathroom sink of a place and there was a the urinal somewhere else in the house connected the same way except through the dishwasher tailpiece in the bathroom under the sink and thar was a second piece of tubing that ran back to the other room and there was a water valve connected to that which was also connected to the cold water of the sink and there was a second valve that was like that of a water fountain momentary wasn't sure what that was for but it did something somewhere but the other one washed the urinal except not from that room but from under the sink just injecting water straight into a t fitting where the two pipes connected. Before the dishwasher tailpiece. Another weird one at my grandmother's house there is a dishwasher tailpiece underneath the old bathroom sink can I figure out where the hose goes I suspect but I could be wrong that it's being used as a vent? However it's after the Trap before the sink drain I doubt there is anything any anak or anywhere near there that would use water that would need to discharge any water at all so kind of perplexed if anyone has any ideas please comment. Also I do like hp's equipment and computers pretty much I've had a few and use many others I used to have a terminal awesome sword that was HP that I used to use in my shop to run other equipment and other miscellaneous tasks and do some other interesting stuff even ran a couple simple games including Tetris and snake and a few others and yes one text Adventure or a few others I once played a arcade game on a piece of test equipment but and no it was not Doom either or that other one brain fart as to which one nor was it Wolfenstein or something like that but something else Something Like a Dungeon Crawler what are some graphics and some texts portions as well it was on a monochrome screen and used original controls for the test equipment to play it seriously I don't know but it's possible as an Easter egg on something too long ago to remember. This was kind of too early to really be on the scene where someone would hacked it into a device so I have no idea I don't even know who made it equipment or what it was I just remember playing the game and yes I also wants a piece of equipment it had an Easter egg of Tetris. I also played Crush the Castle on a piece of testicle that wants which was actually what Angry Birds is based on seriously not necessarily original game just based on another one like almost all games these days at least in the Google Play Store not LOL either too many games that are just a rip-off on another one or trying to turn to games into something they're not just to get a hit by using two parts or two different games and winding up with a game that's even worse than either one of course but what I would like to see would be Angry Birds Meats some sort of first-person shooter where you're playing birds instead of bullets and maybe all the other mobs are pigs or something
Supported these as an HP systems engineer in the field for the dealer channel. Worked very well if you stayed within the customized software available for it but ultimately it’s inability to run off the shelf software and its price tag impacted its general appeal. Not sure if it’s rumor or true, but at the time it was rumored that there was some dissension about what this product was ultimately supposed to be, such that some of the key members of the design team moved on to other projects very shortly after its introduction.
I took my first programming course 1984 on this machine. BASIC programming for business applications - at the age of 14. Always remembered that machine. Still have the certificate :) Nice one Adrian.
My father was on the HP sales force in the waning days of the 150 and the transition to the vectra. He brought a retired 150 home, and I spent countless hours playing Master type and writing school reports on it. Mine had the thermal printer in the top, and an external disk drive unit with one floppy and a hard drive. It took 5 minutes to load MS Word. The hard drive sounded like a small motorcycle engine. I had a Deskjet plugged into the serial port, and I used the HP HIL mouse extensively to draw in the rudimentary graphics program the computer had. Printing a picture took several minutes. This was a trip down memory lane for me. Thanks.
Wow I'm impressed ! Well done. And I never realized how useful debug could be. I was an IBM PC support techie back in the day. We were perhaps the first to sell them here in Cape Town South Africa.
HP had extension cards that would plug into the backplane, and the system board you're testing would then plug into that and hang outside the chassis. They did that for practically everything, worked well enough I guess? You can still find cross reference documents with all those part numbers and whatever off the shelf part they correspond to... mostly. There's a neat program called HPDrive that lets you emulate a HPIB disk drive using a PCI GPIB card in a modern PC, and all the tools for messing with the filesystem on them. Don't even need the entire disk drive!
Yeah they're just a long PCB with straight traces and edge contacts on one end and a edge con socket on the other. Defpom buys the PCBs from somewhere and solders the socket.
I've been in the IT field for over 26 years now, having used machines as old as a Timex Sinclair. Yet, I continue to learn more about these devices every time you release a video. Your enthusiasm is contagious. Cheers to another job well done.
I found 2 HP Vectra QS/12's from my grandparents garage a while back but have never found the setup disk images for them. I really need to get them running, I even have a matching EGA monitor but I've been stuck, this video reminded me of that, they're the only 286 machines I happen to own
*_My humble opinion on why air fixed it_* Those IR lasers floating data points (normally open/normally closed) are held in RAM. Dust not allowing the IR emitter & receiver to see each other held that single bit on that bank closed so long it failed. After replacing the chip, the IR was still reading as failed sticking a bit closed that the computer thought was another failed memory bank. So dust can cause IR failures that pop up as memory failures wherever the Floating NC/NO points are held. So the IR data for that Y-axis row must be held @ 100C,1000 &1004. Grateful to learn from you, I was born the same year as Linux so this is amazing to me that you can actually read your ram.
This was the first PC I ever used, way back in the day. I worked for a statistical analysis company that did all the numbers for one of the UK's first public sector stock exchange flotations ... anyone in the UK, old enough to remember will know the phrase "if you know Sid, tell him" (please feel free to google that one). I learnt Wordstar on this machine ... however, as I used the touch screen, I later failed a few job interviews, as I didn't know the appropriate key combinations. This video is a real blast from the past.
Wow. This thermal printer in a top compartment definitively rings a bell ! I've seen one of these in 1983, at a booth in a computer show in my hometown. I can't remember the agent demonstrating anything touch-screen related though so maybe it was not a HP 150, but some other model. Or maybe thermal printers in top compartments were not that uncommon back then ?
The setups for the screen options allow for the definition of forms and fields. You can define a form layout and then only send/receive the user data. That mouse is the same as was used on the HP9000 workstations. I broke the left button on my first mouse when I discovered Tetris. The printer that this series of terminals/test instruments used was the original ink jet mechanism that had the internal code name "Vesuvius".
This thing must have been expensive. HP at the top of their dev game before they got walloped by Apple & PC compatibles. All tech owes HP and Xerox an enormous debt of gratitude for their huge early leading r&d prowess.
17:47 The botch-wire replacing the trace on the PCB might be to solve Issues of impedance, resistance and or capacitive stuff or something like that - I think I remember Bil Herd saying they had to do that on the A0 line of the Z80's adressbus in the C128 because of that.
I've always heard those called bodge wires not Balch wires but technically either one would be correct I don't know if which one is technically correct as I said either one would describe it and it's possible people think you're saying one even though your might be hearing the other any thoughts on this? Please comment.
I've seen that done on a cheap Taiwanese modem board in the 90's. The PC board was produced defective and one trace was shorted to something, so they simply cut both ends of the trace and used a bodge wire. The company I worked for had bought hundreds of these modems and every single one had the same cut trace and bodge wire patching the trace.
I worked at an electronics manufacturing division of a major defense contractor, and we had a PCB fabrication area. We'd have a run of boards with bad or shorted traces on an internal layer, and those jumpers were used to avoid the expense of scrapping the boards and making new ones. A few times a hole was drilled into or through the board to remove the short. Sometimes the feedthru for an IC pin would get drilled out and an eyelet would be installed in its place and wires run to it. I didn't notice it on Adrian's boards, but on longer runs we'd tack down the wires with small dots of adhesive like RTV or epoxy.
@@scottlarson1548 Thats pretty common actually in older boards. Some cut trace here, some extra wires there. There are entire series of computers that have the same modification like that (Atari XE for example). It kind of looks excessive on this extention board though.
Adrian, I must state to you that your troubleshooting skill is astounding. You have some seriously potent digital fault finding capabilities fine sir. You totally earned the level of respect, which I reserve for only the creme de la creme. Well done Adrian. Thank you once again for taking us along with you on this fantastic voyage! You are really good at what you do brother. Fred
I worked in an office in the mid 1980's that had an HP150 set up like yours that was used mainly as a terminal to link in to ComShare. We also had some HP9836 workstations with external hard drives that were massive heavy things linked via HPIB. I later used some of the early HP Vectras, including an RS25 (386 - 25 MHz machine) that I used as a web server for a few years! That had the HP HIL interface for the mouse and keyboard on it!
Fun fact: This computer is featured prominently (along with a Symbolics 3600 and an Apple //c) in the 1985 film "Real Genius." It's used in the LASER lab to display telemetry data, as well as Kent's (Robert Prescott) primary computer in his dorm room.
You are a very smart man! HP has the best engendered machines, even their tablets are NOT glued together and for this reason alone it’s worth to purchase HP products. I got HP 200lx and I’m blown away what they have accomplished back then! Great video!
At HP in Colorado Springs, the folks who had these took to putting scotch tape over the photoreceptors in the bottom of the monitor bezel to keep the dust out, otherwise they'd have to blow them out every so often. I loved my HP 150. But hardly anyone else at HP did. They were not popular.
Adrian's Digital Basement there was a plastic piece introduced to address the issue later in the 150A’s life. Turns out those holes would clog with dust and dirt, especially the bottom row, so bad, the PCB had to be replaced. The cover was flat on the top and on the bottom had round extrusions with a flat bottom that fit into the holes. It just laid on the bottom of the display. The other three sides remained unprotected. The 12” 150B the “Touchscreen II” the touch was optional. A touch screen bezel could be user installed and was sealed on all four sides
When you said the top is for a thermal printer, the shape immediately made sense. That rounded bump at the back is probably for the roll of thermal paper to sit in behind the printer module.
What a fascinating computer! I would never have guessed that the compartment on top of the monitor is for a printer. I wonder how many people used it as a lunch box to keep their food warm :)
6:00 Touchscreens in the 80's?! I gave a GBA to my young cousins to show them the old Pokemon games, and they kept trying to touch the screen instead of pressing the buttons 😂
The Power on Test error 1000 was a very common issue on those units when they were in service. The row of holes along the bottom of the screen filled up with dust and often needed a small screwdriver or probe to stir up the dust and be blown out - so you did well to only have one LED blocked and to get it out with the air blaster. The LEDs themselves have also been known to fail , resulting in the same error. The 150 Touchscreen II had a plastic cover over the LEDs to prevent that problem - but not many units came with the touchscreen as it was an optional accessory. RAM failures are very common with the 150s - your use of debug is a great way to narrow down the fault!!
@@adriansdigitalbasement As someone else mentioned further down in this thread, HP did release a plastic strip with clear 'plugs' that dropped into the holes on the bottom of the 150A screen to address the issue. They weren't that common but I do remember them from my days as an HP Customer Engineer. But yes, if you have a dusty environment, a cover would be a good idea.
Wow, I'm still amazed how the old HP equipment is reliable and user-friendly. Two years ago I was having lab classes using 70's HP phase generators - I still have no idea how those came to Poland due to a CoCom embargos (I'm a civilian student of military tech university). What's more funny, we've had got the same model of spectrum analizers, but every unit had the other brand: HP, Agilent and Keysight - that's just showing how well their instruments were made if they were so confident selling those through all these years.
There you go: Yet another vintage machine fixed! Pretty soon the dead parts bin will be filled to the brim. Might need some expansion ;-) Kudos Adrian; McGyver would be proud!
Unless I am missing something, I don't think part 2 talking about the floppy drives was ever released? Ack! Don't leave us hanging! 😀
4 ปีที่แล้ว +1
Very nice! Thank you for walking us trough the hardware and all the troubleshooting process! Eager to see the next part regarding the disk drive module. The 80s were like a gold decade for HP, the company developed some interesting modular workstations (some were Unix based).
More HP - around this time I was a physics student and bought a HP-71B pocket computer-calculator - this was a fantastic device and, among other forward-looking things, featured surface mount ICs, one of the very first, if not THE first, devices to do so. Before Carly and Co. HP was one fantastic engineering outfit.
12:22 "It's extremely well engineered like all HP stuff is." I have an HP Officejet 7410 All-in-One and it is designed so that if it detects a problem with either the black or color ink cartridge, it becomes a useless brick. The ink cartridges, which cost over $40 each, dry up in less than a year after they are installed, whether you use them or not. I stopped replacing the color ink cartridge years ago because I rarely used it. However, once while making black-and-white copies, I accidentally pressed the color copy button. At this point the machine detected the color ink had dried up and then refused to allow me to make any more black-and-white copies or use the machine for scanning or anything else. Fortunately, I had saved an old color ink cartridge that, while not having enough ink left to make a decent print, was miraculously accepted. I continued to use the machine for awhile until one day when the black ink prints were looking faded. I removed the black ink cartridge to examine it, but upon putting it back, the machine detected a problem and once again refused to function. Instead of shelling out the money for yet another ink cartridge that would probably dry up in less than a year, I decided to buy a Canon All-in-One laser printer for the cost of 3 black ink cartridges. I am happy to say that my new printer is many times faster than the HP and does not waste a few minutes "warming up" every time I turn it on. The HP also had a bunch of other annoying issues that I will not even mention here. Due to the incredibly horrible software design / engineering of this particular machine, I have vowed never to buy another HP product ever again!
AFAIK nearly all modern inkjets are crap. I still use a DeskJet 812c, which although the lowest-end model of the series, still works fine today. The cartridge interface is well documented and, unlike a modern cartridge, has minimal smarts.
I know this is a very old video, but I'like to let you know that the HP-IL is a general serial bus ("HP Interface Loop") that may connect a lot of different peripherials to the machine. You could say it's a little bit like the IB but for a lmore light-weight ooped serial bus. So - not just a funny mouse connection. Both the available bus types were probably carefully selected by HP; quite some equipment for measurments and control used them, like HP oscillosopes and data recorders. W all that said - really nice to see the machine being taken care of; we should maintain some more respect of old technology and not just throw it away because it' not new any longer... I believe I've got a few HP-150 machines w both HD and FD units in good shape still stuffed away somewhere. Perhaps I should also mention that the compatibility isn't entirely bad; long ago I actually transferred some binaries runnable on an standard DOS PC right to the HP150 and the exacuted just fine.
yeah, I don't know why less than 99%+ compatibility surprises anyone. All the machines of that period, including very nice ones like the DEC Digital Rainbow, Tandy 1000, etc, weren't fully compatible, with the exception of Compaq, even a couple of PCs which "pirated" the PC BIOS outright weren't "fully" compatible. Copyright of digital items hadn't been set in US law yet, Phoenix had not sold BIOS that would enable clone-makers, "ISA bus" didn't even have a name. The whole clone business didn't start until later, and didn't really pick up until Windows 3.1 came out. Although Basic was very compatible, most all being provided by Microsoft at the time. There was some expectation that homebrew Basic programs could be traded and shared.
Good job, great video. Damn... HP had 6 layer boards and touchscreen in 1983... It's amazing how technology that's ahead of it's time never cathches on to the public...
Your logical problem-solving skills and never-give-up attitude really were top notch in this one, Adrian! Really nice to watch and learn about the assembly tools to get at the memory level and see exactly what's happening and narrow down the problematic chips. The design of the HP 150 reminds me a lot of the early-gen Apple Mac's. This and the original 128K Mac were released just months apart. I wonder if any of the engineers/designers talked with each other. And I really like how over-engineered the HP 150 is. Everything's easy-access and the components go together with ease - like high-end servers. Wish that was true of today's components... Also, I was blown away when you did the close-up of the text on-screen. Those characters looked fantastic. Programming would be enjoyable! Anyways, thanks for the in-depth discussion on this amazing piece of HP engineering. Looking forward to part 2! Long live RPN!
So you're still uploading regularly and YT just didn't show me ANY videos from you for like half a year to a year?? Touchscreen? Almost 40 years ago? Wow. (2000s kid with interest in old tech here) Great work on the debugging, you managed to catch the interest of someone with ADHD for 50 minutes :)
Whoa! And here I thought my IBM 8516 was an early touch screen example! EDIT: I'm very surprised how similar that keyboard and mouse are to the ones I use on my HP 9000/720 from nearly a decade later! EDIT 2: Chassis and expansion cards are done in a very similar way as well!
Instantly recognize that incredibly uncomfortable HP mouse. Used from the graphics terminals on my college's 9000/300 servers all the way through the 425 machines and the 7xx workstations. I loved our 712i machines because we could use normal PS/2 mice with them. One day the HP guy came out to upgrade the CPUs and I saw that inside that pizza box case they used foam to mount the disk drives. Broke my heart. Then Compaq bought HP and it all went to hell :( commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HP-HP9000-712-100-Workstation_01.jpg
Glad you were able to fix it Adrian, I recall working with a few of those models, plus some similar ones and various HP terminals. That was back when they were new or at least not old. 😉 HPIL stands for HP Interface Loop; think of it as similar to the Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) but for more than just keyboards and mice. The HPIB / GPIB / IEEE-488 Bus was a great way to connect equipment together. Back in the late '70s to mid '80s I worked with automated test stations, computer driven test equipment used to test and troubleshoot electronic assemblies and systems. Using a computer program to control things like multimeters, frequency counters, function generators and even digital oscilloscopes with waveform analyzers made it easier to test batches of devices quickly. You still needed good troubleshooting skills (as you used for your RAM problem!) since you had to also understand what the test station was telling you and know when it was giving you a false indication.
That's really some quality build from HP. So much different from those clones that were around back then. I'm really impressed by that 1983 engineering.
These units had two main uses: 1. A Terminal for HP and other main frames. 2. To run Very Expensive Lab Equipment like HP's Gas Chromatographs that often cost more then most expensive houses at that time. Printer on top was common way to screen print of results for lab equipment or terminal sessions. Not a good way to "print a book" or even a few pages. They were rarely used to compete with IBM PC and Clones for other business cases. HP did not allow service beyond board swapping for many reasons. A big one is if anyone messes up the 150 and damage the lab equipment... That can cause Fatal problems to people using the systems. Chips in Sockets had big problems and easy to steal too. If you have to re plug hundreds of chips in a month just to get many IBM PC to boot you might know how bad this really is and that's even with the right tools.
My dad worked for HP and I think he was regional director for pc sales at the time. I had one of these at home complete with the thermal printer on top. I never saw one with a mouse though. I remember playing Zork on this. I typed all my school assignments in wordstar and printed them on a daisy wheel “letter quality” printer.
re: manually soldered wires ... I would suspect fixing timing issues, because in all the instances you point out the original traces have been cut not only as near as possible to the soldering points, but always at both ends. This makes sense if you need to avoid any signal reflections which would otherwise happen if you leave one end or both ends connected.
IZ8DWF thinks that it is because of crosstalk issues in that six layer board due to those existing traces being too close to another trace right under it.
that's impressive , i mean they've made such a great technology which we're still using it today , didn't know that this tech was that old , good job HP
I was given the task of evaluating a Vectra in 1985 for our team PCs. It was definitely not 100 percent compatible and required its own OEM version of DOS. However, it was a great pleasure to use, extremely well made, and beautiful to look at. It had a 80286 running at 8 MHz. It had a very excellent keyboard which was every bit as good as the IBM model M but much quieter. The symbols were molded into the keys, as on their calculators. We nixed it due to lack of full compatibility but I got to keep the evaluation unit as my terminal (most of our work was done on minis and mainframes).
The 1985 Vectra certainly looks pretty boring compared to this machine -- but I guess that's what it meant to be a PC compatible back then. I see from pictures it used the same keyboard as the HP 150, which is neat.
The graphic arts and architectural supply store Charrette used to use these as terminals throughout their store. The employees used them for access to their inventory system on their mini- computer. The bus wire may have been used to avoid etch shorts. There may have been some kind of contamination, or fine copper threads on the boards that required cutting the etches and rerouting wires around those locations. I ran into that as a PCB tech. The company had a batch of boards that had some contamination of some kind that "grew" together and caused the address bus to short out. After the issue was discovered, etches were cut and bus wire was run around those places.
I think HP holds the crown for least ergonomic mouse. Early mice weren't known for their comfort, but only HP seems to have gone on the offensive against their users. Another great video sir, rock on!
Track cuts and wire straps that look like a waste of time may be because of signal cross-coupling, or noise. They might have cut them for testing/debugging and then needed to put them back. All before the days when EMC became a big thing.
Another thing to consider on touch screens of this type is LED lighting pulses can confuse the sensors just like they do on the PCJr keyboard. Also some newer computers with touch screens (like 2010's era) can go haywire if the screen refresh rate and touch scan rate are not in sync. I've seen this on Dell XT2 laptops and some Dell all-in-ones where the cursor jumps wildy around with older video drivers and newer drivers fix it.
this machine wasn't presumably aimed at consumers... I think this would have been used in a production environment for spec-testing bedcause lots of measuring equipment used HP-IB back in the day, like Multimeters and Oscilloscopes I guess this might have been a place for quality control with an automated test setup for some kind of production line, and a worker used the touchscreen for ease of use in the production environment and the printer at the top might be for example as a quality control measure like QC Passed stickers but with the actual readings if the device is in spec or not for example...
![ลองสุ่มไอโฟน 990 โกงมั้ย? [ โกงมั้ยครับ ep.101 ] | DOM](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/bfsWe0j492k/mqdefault.jpg)
Upon further study of the service manual, I was not interpreting the the selt-test errors displayed on the CRT properly. They are a 16 bit code which must be compared against a table that breaks down each problem area. See page 88 and page 90 in the HP 150 service manual. The codes 1000, 1004, 100C and 000C make sense now. The first 1 points to the touch screen issue and the xxxC or xxx4 all point to RAM issues (which turned out to be the expansion RAM board.) The LEDs must always be decoded to read the proper error code from the machine. Live and learn! HP 150 service manual: www.bitsavers.org/pdf/hp/hp150/45625-90001_HP-150_Technical_Manual_May84.pdf
That was excellent problem solving. It shows how dead ends and false assumptions can lead you in the wrong direction, but using common sense and observation can keep you progressing forward.
I was gonna say to hit up curiousmarc on YT for all things HP, he's probably got one or at least may have a line on the service manual.
Niall Fleming Or the Imsai guy also great Retro Computer Channel and Former HP guy
You've taken away my chance to comment that those error codes clearly mean "Fault with error reporting system". Heh. Anyway, this must be one of your very best repairs yet, considering the lack of documentation and that tricky board.
Maybe it's just me but I can't figure out which pages you mean. I opened that link and tried PDF page 88, nope. 8-8? Nope. *-88? Doesn't exist. Anyone able to find it?
In High School (1986) I worked as a security guard at HP in Cupertino. We had this machine controlling our security center. Its touch screens would change the monitors (Televisions) on the wall to the channels we needed to view. If someone didn't access a door correctly, the machine would register the alarm and allow us to switch the camera, and log the alarm details all with touch. Given the year, it was such an amazing piece of integration. It had the printer installed that would Print both the normal alarms, but could also print the CRT image from the selected TV. The control and connectivity for this single screen was and still is the most heavy integration of serial control I have ever seen. Hundreds of HID readers attached to a server, and those servers had door lock controls managed by the same machine running the monitors, the alarms and the daily logs. Amazing for its time. Think DBase 4 with legs.
this was also my first year of seeing 3d graphics running on some development prototype display of a car rotating in air, it was a dodge Charger Shelby graphic picture rendered in 3d and it was eye candy never seen in the bay area. They also had a Ink "Plotter" that was huge but could print in color! like an artist, it would spin a color pallet of ink jars, pick the pen and like modern 3d printers, it would draw using vectors. I would say I was amazed, but now I think I spent too many hours wasted as a youth.
HP security officer (AKA globe security) 1986 - 1989
@@trs-80fanclub12 same time, I had a Highschool buddy who's dad was sales director of HP Germany. You can imagine the stuff this guy had in his basement... it was amazing. He sourced HP-11 calculators for his inner circle at school, have mine still, running like new. Programmable calculators weren't allowed to use in school, but the teachers turned a blind eye because they were so impressed that we could handle RPN.
That sounds so exciting!
Yes, I remember that all the Bay Area front desk people had these monitors for security.
And these days such systems run as bloated servers on top of Windows, and are usually not really impressive for how much resources they need to run.
It was nice to see the HP-150 once again. I did the port of MS-DOS for the HP-150 back when I worked for HP (plus a custom version of WordStar for the 150 as well). People might ask why the HP 150 was not IBM PC compatible. The IBM-PC was released in August 1981 and wasn't shipped in large quantities for months. It wasn't clear for the first half of 1982 that the whole IBM-PC; hardware, BIOS, and PC-DOS (MS_DOS), would become the standard, not just MS-DOS. What made it the standard was the large amount of computer software that was available for the IBM-PC that bypassed PC-DOS and accessed the BIOS and the hardware directly. In a way it was the fact that PC-DOS was really a poor operating system that caused the standard to be more than just the PC-DOS interface. There were some software titles available on the day the PC was released but it took about a year for the software base to expand to the point that the PC had become the defactor standard. It wasn't until late 1982 that IBM-PC compatibles, like the Eagle PC, started to appear.
There were not just technological challenges making an IBM-PC compatible. There were legal issues too since the standard included the BIOS interface. Eagle Computer just copied the IBM-PC ROM and tried to argue that it wasn't copyright infringement because the ROM was hardware. Well,,,,,,, it was copyright infringement , and the legal challenges destroyed Eagle Computer. We were in the planning stages of the HP-150 well before it was determined the IBM-PC was the new standard. Some early startups, like Gavalin Computer, used up their entire financing only to release a non-IBM-PC compatible product at about the same time it was becoming clear that IBM-PC compatibility was a requirement. Gavalin never recovered. HP had a large customer base and was able to make the HP-150 a successful even without PC compatibility.
The HP-150 got a mention in the TV series "Halt and Catch Fire". As the main characters of the show are walking through the 1983 Consumer Electronics Show one of the characters says something like "Hey, did you see that touch screen computer from HP". I enjoyed hearing that.
How old are you ?
HP was A Giant Company And Could Absorb the Losses Of Their NON DOS Machines!! They Had their Copy Machines Fax Machines etc To fall back on! That Is What kept HP from Biting The Dust With This Blunder! It Did not take them long to figure out MS-DOS Was The New Standard! I Had a HP Tape Recorder Back In The Late 70's Then A HP PC In the 90's! We Had A IBM PCjr In The 80's! I have owned dozens of good old HP PC,s Since that time But Eventually Migrated To DELL after I aided In the Construction Of Their Nashville TN Plant! I Have a 15 Year Old Dell with a Q6600 CPU That I Still Use as A Media Server! Had to replace the power supply 6 years ago and Upgrades the ram and SSD but it still is responsive as any of the cheap PC's out there Today! Running Linux Not The MALWARE/SPYWARE That Windows Has Become Since The Early Win7 Release!
This probably was one of the best products you could get as a professional back then, the level of integration was ahead of its time because we didn't see similar products from IBM until 5 years later. HP always gave me the impression they are behind the scenes doing their professional focused products very well but they had problems with the commercial ones. This is on my perspective on have been a salesman for the company about 15 years ago, their public commercial PC products were a little of a clown show withe very dubious decisions.
Later I got into IT and now I'm working in mainframe and learned what they are about really. All their professional products are top notch, I have owned several office HP laptops and they are the best I tried, best ergonomics, durability, service, I even bought them second hand for relatives and they still kick strong. They are the one of the few who offer the 6 del/ins/home/end/pgup/pgdn row in 14 and less inches laptops, which they are absolutely mandatory for my work. I had to work with a similar Dell for a while and asked for an HP replacement because it just wrecked my workflow. Those are the good details.
@@kevinlsims7330What are you talking about? HP didn't make copy and fax machines, at least not in any significant quantity back then. The printers and plotters they made were designed to be used with their test equipment, just like their computers. Their main business was test equipment and computers of various sizes. The LaserJet and all that came later. Also, it's really, really not necessary to capitalize every single word in a sentence, it comes off as really obnoxious and difficult to read ....
Also, if you read what the original commenter said (who actually worked for HP and would probably know better)... this wasn't a "blunder", this machine still sold very well because, like their other computers before and after this point, they were designed to be used with HP's test equipment and engineering tools to create custom test and verification setups. So you could have one of these machines connected to a whole rack of HP test equipment on an assembly line, and do extensive testing to make sure your product was working correctly. This was HP's bread and butter during the 70s and 80s. Go check out the HP test equipment catalogues from the 1970s, their computers were listed in there because that was how they viewed their computers first and foremost -- tools to be used with test equipment to automate and log results.
Yes, people don't understand, when IBM gave Microsoft the rights to license to other companies, they fully expected the MS-DOS machines would be mostly incompatible! It was Compaq that really got "full" compatibility as a feature, although the PC 1600 was the first, released in June 1982 by Columbia Data Products, with the Portable, Compaq made $111 million in revenue it's first year. IBM setttled out-of-court with Eagle because Eagle copied the PC BIOS byte for byte. "Halt and Catch Fire" more closely resembles the history of Corona Data Systems, except they also cloned the BIOS and later settled with IBM. I don't know why this association wasn't played up, and they pushed the Compaq reverse engineering angle. The only other similarity was the Texas location.
"Extremely well engineered, like all HP stuff is." I think you mean all HP stuff before around 2007.
Yeah good point!! Like all the HP scientific and test stuff back then :-)
@1000 Subs with just Playlists Not really sure, all I know is I have a 2005 HP laptop that runs well with no heat issues, and three HP laptops from 2008 and 2013 that have absolutely terrible heat issues (i had to remove the plastic vents over the single tiny cooling fan to get it to stay on during summer this year), and I've had two HP printers fail fairly quickly recently, plus my grandma got an HP printer where the wireless function, which was one of the main selling points, stopped working after a couple days, and when we went to return it, there were two other people in the queue with the same printer. After that, that model of printer was advertised as a USB printer only, with no wireless functionality.
1000 Subs with just Playlists - the Compaq acquisition is what really did it for the consumer stuff, they spun that off to Compaq. If you look at the computers just before and just after that, the difference is obvious. Their enterprise grade stuff is still alright these days.
HP started going down hill when they started having a string of successively worse CEOs who cared more about lining their pockets than actually making good products. it's pretty sad.
@1000 Subs with just Playlists nice username made chuckle!
I've seen some really creative ones though so definitely a good one.
Story behind it? If there was one?
I did a work/study program while in High School at HP's Colorado Telecommunications Division in Colorado Springs. They had tons of these, mostly used at terminals for a mainframe. Only a few had the thermal printers in the monitors, and those who didn't put tissue boxes in them.
It was amusing seeing people pulling Kleenex tissues from the tops of their computers.
Remember the thin paper? omg , and it was soo much like burning an image lol
Kleenex dispenser! OMG that's too funny. I actually moved the machine off the bench and stored the GPIB cable and mouse in there. It's shockingly handy!
Since these machines were built at the calculator division facility in Ft Collins Colorado, I guess they didn't have all that far to travel :-P
Mine does not have a thermal printer but I have a Thinkjet that now works after replacing the ribbon cable to the print head. It still amazes me you can still get the print cartridges. So I use the top for storing fanfold paper.
Which would have even be more hilarious if someone mistakenly thought the printer was a tissue box. So they hit PRINT... and then proceed to pull the print from the machine and blow their nose with them.
For a machine that was intended for mostly scientific purposes, having a built-in thermal printer kind of made sense, though.
I haven't watched anything this riveting since Apollo 13 :) Also that screen and those fonts are absolutely gorgeous and the infrared grid is ingenious. I miss old school HP :(
"I haven't watched anything this riveting since Apollo 13"
But he didn't use any rear projection effect while filming the repair of this computer.
Maybe it was just a main bus B undervolt? ;) Though I just thought either he didn't show it on video or he didn't test the power rails.
my dad had one from work (he worked for HP Corporate) and we loved playing with it at home! Brings back memories. I remember printing patterns on the thermo printer on the top as a kid! Was pretty cool. I didn't realize it was optional. I thought the printer was just part of it.
37 years and just needs compressed air and one chip that’s reliable.
I'd say that's a 10-4 affirmative a good buddy on that one.
Also with the compressed air a note with sound when using dust off or or similar ran into this on an old Gateway machine.
I was having some issues with it overheating.
And in one day it wouldn't even stay on for a few minutes.
Popped open the case and sure enough heatsink was packed with dust.
A lot of other things as well including the fan.
And processor heatsink fan of course.
I was using the dust off or similar and I was doing this in my bedroom big mistake one big cloud of dust and I'd use so much I was not feeling good because of the effects of the dust off or whatever it was on me and I was not aware they do that so be careful.
Best weapon to do it outside in generals not just with the nature of the stuff but the dust cloud as well just undid all my cleaning for that month it seemed like.
Conclusão, não mexa no que esta quieto.
@@aaronbrandenburg2441 I use an air compressor. And do it outside, of course. Best also to wear a mask or respirator, especially if you think mice might have been in there.
@@aaronbrandenburg2441 or run the vacuum above where you're blowing out
The dust was not the main part I was referring to who is actually the the stuff that's used for the dusting spray that I was having problems with there was enough of it in the air that I wasn't feeling so good yeah and got to my respiratory system that was the big part they be running a big fan but I had no idea I was going to need to use that much and didn't know how much dust was in there's heat sinks and everything so vacuum cleaner would not have really done anything for the spray itself but dust maybe but still would have been a real mess. And I did not have time to disconnect everything and get it outside plus it was raining and I had to get back going on something I was doing immediately on the computer so no options other than to do it is there and at that moment sometimes things are like that but learn my lesson about using large quantities of dusting spray in a small size room.
label says NO USER SERVICABLE PARTS INSIDE.......... adrian says...its HP its very servicable lol
... in stark contrast to th-cam.com/video/zFA3szW9nWk/w-d-xo.html
Adrian isn't a user.
@@stinchjack totally 100% agree if you own it which it seems like apples case s he has said you don't really own it just like software that you don't own and many other things that once you purchase it it should be yours and be able to do what you want with it including having anyone you please to repair it as you can tell I thoroughly agree with the point in full!
Just like they say in the maker community if you own it you should be able to take it apart modify it whatever and if it doesn't fit your needs you should be able to modify it the way you want warranty void if removed should be outlawed completely banned but of course companies have to protect their rear end if some like really screw something up but trying to do something past what can be fixed it would fall back on them because of something the user it done to their own equipment I understand that however that should not interfere with reasonable things that someone is doing technically we have the right to repair in some situations however there needs to be legislation that's consumer orientated and protects our rights to our own equipment Etc and Legacy on legislation of what can and cannot be doing like in the case of apple and others so you open it you broke it or you try to fix it sorry no parts for you or you touch a screw we don't touch it no repair for you or sorry you can't program that part your device no longer works we didn't do it you did when actuality that was what the product was designed to do to prevent it from Dean. Buy legitimate repair services or ady hot for assume that would be able to fix something normally companies are so pigheaded that they want you to buy a new device in many cases I think about the song All speakers deliberately at least a first breaking them I'm sure this was not the first taste of this heard of others but can't remember at this time all I've heard about this but this will only continue to happen worse and worse the community needs to get together someway somehow and Soldier on until whoever takes notice and changed the laws to reflect what would work and be reasonable for both sides of things if possible and be able to get things appointed there are ways in which a company could say no to repair if something's jacked up to the point that it would have been unreasonable for a user to do something or a repair got a rolly but yet comforter butts when appropriate and so that people cannot just get a new device because they checked it up and they're not able to in the person tries to pin it on them when it would not be the right thing to happen in a reasonable situation.
Butthead yet have rules and legislation that would State exactly what a manufacturer I would or could not do and clear guidelines as to what is appropriate and acceptable in cases such as these and others that both sides could agree on at least as much as possible and work for the good of all that's watch as possible it might be a pipe dream to have this happen but it needs to get a lot better it's just crazy either or just make your project open source and be done with it that might just solve it encourage cell phone repair don't turn it into something that's a death sentence for the device.
Serviceable by HP or a repair shop, not the end user. There’s still a difference of welding it shut to having it easily come apart in a modular fashion.
@@0xbenedikt not really my point though but I seriously saying so just so you know.
A very good computer from HP. I used the computer until 2001. I liked that green on the monitor. The sharpness of the writing could be adjusted on the back wall. My monitor had hardware that allowed me to write in Russian. I associated myself with the USSR with various institutions. This gave me access to the most secret connections. Everything with the HP 150. The HP 150 was developed for World War III. It should still be functioning 200 years after a Soviet nuclear strike. Pentagon's secret HP 150 project in the 1970s. If you have an HP 150 you are a lucky person. But you are also a powerful human with the most dangerous computer weapon in the world.
I really appreciate the extra energy and intuitiveness you took into putting and finding the bad RAM chip and detailing your thought process. Thanks for giving this old machine some extra love.
I was a service tech for HP when these came out. We would have a customer get a straw and blow out the holes if we did not want to go out there or were busy. Later HP made a plastic strip that blocked the lower holes from dust, You can also use clear Scotch tape to cover the lower holes and prevent this failure. HP also was making the HP 125 a CPM computer, and a UNIX luggable computer at the same time. The MS-DOS won that battle. Many of these HP-150 computers were used to control HP Lab equipment such as Spectrum analyzers and other test equipment as well as medical equipment because of the HP-IB (IEEE-488) interface. Back in the HP office we connected these to HP 404 MB disk drives for fun. The disk drives were the size of a washing machine. Much of the older HP technology gets scrapped (recycled) as the boards many times had gold traces. At one time Compaq was thinking of licensing the HP thermal printer for their early luggable computers. The licensing never worked out. But Compaq ran their business on the HP 3000 and larger computers.
Your way of diagnosing these problems very much reminds me of how Eric O. of South Maine Auto diagnoses car problems. Very logical approach. Car problems vs. computer problems, yet the way to find the cause or culprit is very much the same. A logic approach: i do this, i expect that to happen, but this happens instead, so that must be wrong. This logical reasoning is also why i very much love watching your videos. It soothes my brain. Thanks, Adrian!
Ey there viewers welcome back to the adrian basement channel. Today we're looking at an hp 150. Were using a fujitsu ram module...not a sponsor. Lol
I like both channels. Good troubleshooting skills are so refreshing to watch.
Also: "If I swap this component into that position, does the problem move along with it or does it stay where it was?"
Basic problem localization, troubleshooting and jury-rigging skills can get you a very long way as a service engineer.
Watching this right after Technology Connection's video on touch lamps.
His channel is so absolutely amazing!
As did I :) Lurch -> Perifractic -> 8 bit guy ->Technology Connections -> Adrian. A great saturday!
I watched this right after Technology Connections as well. Some very 'touching' content today.
@@falksweden Say What? Don't you watch LGR? If not, shame on you! lol just kidding :P
@@BertGrink I do, but not before Adrian yesterday. And Big Clive, RMC, EEVBlog, Mr Carlson, Dave Tipton and so on. 😁
The HP Machines were extremely popular in Laboratories of all kind. A predecessor, the HP-85 already had a small Printer built in to print out e.g. measuring protocols on the fly. This is why the option was included to put a printer on top, not so silly ;-) HP PCs of this era were build like tanks, I had a AT-compatible early Vectra that ran for 10 years without the slightest failure (same mouse as this 150, by the way...)
Woah! Blast from the past. When I was an undergrad (mid 80s) they had one of these in the main computer lab. It was used as one of the many terminals for the HP3000 system on campus.
Thanks for revisiting the HP-150. Lots of interesting history with this computer. I wrote the HPIB disk driver for the HP-150. As a side note... HP was developing its own operating system for the HP-150 called HPIQ. I probably had the only copy of MS-DOS at HP that I got from Microsoft, but hadn’t done anything with it when a colleague asked to borrow it. HP eventually gave up on inventing its own operating system and switched to MS-DOS.
Interesting! I'm still playing with the machine getting ready for my second video on it. Was HPIQ ever released for the 150?
@@adriansdigitalbasement HPIQ was never released. They got pretty far with it, but in the end... MS-DOS was done and working. HP added a number of applications on top that could leverage the other money makers (like plotters!)
Nice find, Adrian. The design of this thing inside and out is so ridiculously charming. It's almost like in their attempt to make it so convenient and modular, it's kind of over-engineered.
HP seemed to use the same design philosophy on this as they used on their industrial and test gear. Totally not like a normal consume PC.
That's really advanced for 1983. The adjustable display angle and the concept of a printer stacked on top just make it better
I always loved HP's teal and purple color scheme. It always looked so different and cool. I especially liked it on my HP 48GX!
I acquired an HP 150 from a coworker that retired and I was also getting the 1000 code. Thanks to your video, I just blew out the LED holes on the monitor and my error went away too!
Great video! I remember as a kid going with my dad to a Tech Expo in 1984 here in South America and saw this computer being demo'ed by an HP agent in their booth and the crowd went wooow when he touched the screen and menus changed in the display, we thought this product was from the future
The machine is actually very servicable and it is very easy to access once you have proper tools. The sliding boards construction is still very popular in some industrial gear. The idea is that you should have special extension/diagnostic boards that are mostly just direct connections from one side to the other. You plug it into the main interconnect board and plug a board you want to play around with into it. This way your board is just hanging in the air outside the case that gives easy access to both sides and some mechanical stability at the same time. The only real downside of the approach is the amount of high quality connectors and boards and board guides and supporting brackets required is so high that it makes the whole system much heavier and much more expensive than if it was just quickly shoved into a box, screwed up to whatever and hooked up with some wires.
Great problem solving, as always.
And I'm really glad you called it "bit 3" instead of "bit 4". lol
Yep, it's strange when they don't add better diag code to the BIOS.
In assembly, it wouldn't take up much space at all to add a simple 0x00 / 0xFF / 0xAA / 0x55 RAM check, and show which bank has failed.
(or a walking-bit test, to determine which bank AND chip had failed.)
But HP were a lot like IBM, where the retail cost of the machine meant they didn't too care much about board-level repairs.
They obviously saved a bit on the cost of the IC sockets, too.
I remember using a machine like this. The one I used had the thermal printer installed. I never knew that it was NOT IBM compatible, nor did I know that the computer was in the monitor, not with the floppy drives! I first used such a computer back in 1988. It was in an insurance processing company that used an HP 3000 Series III mini computer, which was already ancient. The company used HP terminals along with a very few of these computers, which were still just mostly used as a slightly smarter terminal.
Adrian, I watched this really nice video and stumbled across your daubts, why people route botch-wires identical to their traces. I found these type of fixes myself inside Rohde & Schwarz RF test systems. The reason is very simple: The original traces are too close to the side of the cards and are prone to fail by being mechanically ripped off by the card rails. With conductive assemblies, like the RF tes equipment, there is a risc of shorting things out so close to the case or slides. So they cut the traces and used some botch wire. May be that helps to demystify that double-routing :)
Adrian, this video brought back memories. We used 150s as terminals to an HP3000. I used to take a little ball of Blue-Tak and throw it at the screen and watch the cursor follow the sticky ball as it slowly rolled down the screen. I think some of the monitors had thermal printers on top.
I was hired by HP way back in 1984 as the HP150 expert and even had the ROM source code at one point when I was writing an assembler based Beehive terminal emulator. If you rented a car on the east coast back in then that transaction was done at the airport on a HP150. Later they even offered driving directions where you used the touch screen to touch your map info and got a thermal printout of how to drive there. I never kept any of that hardware as I was always chasing the next fastest computer, but it was fun and HP-HIL was very similar to what would become USB. You could daisy-chain devices off of HP-HIL also.
WOW!!! It's been SO long since I played on that type of system, I really aggravated my uncle (Who owned it) after I systematically tried every available command, ending up on FORMAT... Oh he was annoyed. Pretty cool system, I was blown away by the high resolution monochrome touch display. Even had a modem that he would use to connect to a mainframe at work (He worked at HP as an engineer and helped in e-beam probing bare dies for the PA/RISC processors during test and troubleshooting).
"it's a HP so it's well engineered"
*cries in modern HP"
I mean, all the business stuff still seems fine, for now anyway. Though, I only have EliteDesk 800 G1 and G2 systems, and a more modern EliteDisplay S270n
Correction grabs tissue from paper exit SWAT for printer on top of computer and cries into the tissue on top of computer and cries into the tissue yeah we're friends in another comment as to what people had use that for a tissue holder seriously.
What's build a device to allow you to use a paper towel roll to the front fake drawer of a older kitchen cabinet below the sink the paper towel would pass through with those decorative sloths that was poor ventilation to keep washer from building up under the sink excetera they knew do actually make modern drawers that have a place for paper towels wish they would do the same for tissues be a nice touch for either side of the bathroom. Or kitchen.
By the way what the worst ideas ever had somebody say that their house smells like urine next to utility sink their place had a place attached to it that was shared with another Resident turns out there was a urinal like that of a portable toilet accept metal and the hose yes hose ran down took a right angle turn into a Copper hype and Waldo in your utility room running into the laundry machine tubs at first they thought it was an overflow or something else having to do it from the old systems in the house when they first saw it and then later on they realize what the smell was and what was coming out of it needless to say they are no longer sharing a residence they found out they were actually living there illegally and never got any compensation or anyone or anything they should have to even live there they just took it that it was a separate residence until they found out when they brought this up with some other issue when it was brought up turns out they are a lot more space there place quite by accident also not sure why but I had seen something like that except done with a dishwasher tailpiece in the bathroom sink of a place and there was a the urinal somewhere else in the house connected the same way except through the dishwasher tailpiece in the bathroom under the sink and thar was a second piece of tubing that ran back to the other room and there was a water valve connected to that which was also connected to the cold water of the sink and there was a second valve that was like that of a water fountain momentary wasn't sure what that was for but it did something somewhere but the other one washed the urinal except not from that room but from under the sink just injecting water straight into a t fitting where the two pipes connected. Before the dishwasher tailpiece.
Another weird one at my grandmother's house there is a dishwasher tailpiece underneath the old bathroom sink can I figure out where the hose goes I suspect but I could be wrong that it's being used as a vent? However it's after the Trap before the sink drain I doubt there is anything any anak or anywhere near there that would use water that would need to discharge any water at all so kind of perplexed if anyone has any ideas please comment.
Also I do like hp's equipment and computers pretty much I've had a few and use many others I used to have a terminal awesome sword that was HP that I used to use in my shop to run other equipment and other miscellaneous tasks and do some other interesting stuff even ran a couple simple games including Tetris and snake and a few others and yes one text Adventure or a few others I once played a arcade game on a piece of test equipment but and no it was not Doom either or that other one brain fart as to which one nor was it Wolfenstein or something like that but something else Something Like a Dungeon Crawler what are some graphics and some texts portions as well it was on a monochrome screen and used original controls for the test equipment to play it seriously I don't know but it's possible as an Easter egg on something too long ago to remember. This was kind of too early to really be on the scene where someone would hacked it into a device so I have no idea I don't even know who made it equipment or what it was I just remember playing the game and yes I also wants a piece of equipment it had an Easter egg of Tetris.
I also played Crush the Castle on a piece of testicle that wants which was actually what Angry Birds is based on seriously not necessarily original game just based on another one like almost all games these days at least in the Google Play Store not LOL either too many games that are just a rip-off on another one or trying to turn to games into something they're not just to get a hit by using two parts or two different games and winding up with a game that's even worse than either one of course but what I would like to see would be Angry Birds Meats some sort of first-person shooter where you're playing birds instead of bullets and maybe all the other mobs are pigs or something
Aaron Brandenburg holy fuck I nearly had a stroke trying to read that
Supported these as an HP systems engineer in the field for the dealer channel. Worked very well if you stayed within the customized software available for it but ultimately it’s inability to run off the shelf software and its price tag impacted its general appeal.
Not sure if it’s rumor or true, but at the time it was rumored that there was some dissension about what this product was ultimately supposed to be, such that some of the key members of the design team moved on to other projects very shortly after its introduction.
I took my first programming course 1984 on this machine. BASIC programming for business applications - at the age of 14. Always remembered that machine.
Still have the certificate :)
Nice one Adrian.
What a cute little nugget.
Very impressive work locating that dead RAM!
Instead of cutting all the pins on the ram. Cut the power or enable pin. You can solder it back together if it's not that pin.
But it would still backpower it via the ESD clamp diodes, so perhaps only cut the enable and tie it high.
My father was on the HP sales force in the waning days of the 150 and the transition to the vectra. He brought a retired 150 home, and I spent countless hours playing Master type and writing school reports on it. Mine had the thermal printer in the top, and an external disk drive unit with one floppy and a hard drive. It took 5 minutes to load MS Word. The hard drive sounded like a small motorcycle engine. I had a Deskjet plugged into the serial port, and I used the HP HIL mouse extensively to draw in the rudimentary graphics program the computer had. Printing a picture took several minutes. This was a trip down memory lane for me. Thanks.
Wow I'm impressed ! Well done. And I never realized how useful debug could be. I was an IBM PC support techie back in the day. We were perhaps the first to sell them here in Cape Town South Africa.
HP had extension cards that would plug into the backplane, and the system board you're testing would then plug into that and hang outside the chassis. They did that for practically everything, worked well enough I guess?
You can still find cross reference documents with all those part numbers and whatever off the shelf part they correspond to... mostly.
There's a neat program called HPDrive that lets you emulate a HPIB disk drive using a PCI GPIB card in a modern PC, and all the tools for messing with the filesystem on them. Don't even need the entire disk drive!
Yeah they're just a long PCB with straight traces and edge contacts on one end and a edge con socket on the other. Defpom buys the PCBs from somewhere and solders the socket.
There's even a windows image available at the HP museum site that can be loaded via hpdrive. I wish i had the memory card so i could run it.
I've been in the IT field for over 26 years now, having used machines as old as a Timex Sinclair. Yet, I continue to learn more about these devices every time you release a video. Your enthusiasm is contagious. Cheers to another job well done.
This was a brilliant video. From explaining what the system was, to its fault and using debug to find the fault.
I found 2 HP Vectra QS/12's from my grandparents garage a while back but have never found the setup disk images for them. I really need to get them running, I even have a matching EGA monitor but I've been stuck, this video reminded me of that, they're the only 286 machines I happen to own
*_My humble opinion on why air fixed it_*
Those IR lasers floating data points (normally open/normally closed) are held in RAM. Dust not allowing the IR emitter & receiver to see each other held that single bit on that bank closed so long it failed. After replacing the chip, the IR was still reading as failed sticking a bit closed that the computer thought was another failed memory bank. So dust can cause IR failures that pop up as memory failures wherever the Floating NC/NO points are held. So the IR data for that Y-axis row must be held @ 100C,1000 &1004.
Grateful to learn from you, I was born the same year as Linux so this is amazing to me that you can actually read your ram.
This was the first PC I ever used, way back in the day. I worked for a statistical analysis company that did all the numbers for one of the UK's first public sector stock exchange flotations ... anyone in the UK, old enough to remember will know the phrase "if you know Sid, tell him" (please feel free to google that one). I learnt Wordstar on this machine ... however, as I used the touch screen, I later failed a few job interviews, as I didn't know the appropriate key combinations. This video is a real blast from the past.
The HP-150! We have one in our collection. Very interesting machine.
HP stuff is very cool. High quality that isn't much anymore in PC hardware. I love to see stuff like this from their archives demonstrated.
Wow. This thermal printer in a top compartment definitively rings a bell ! I've seen one of these in 1983, at a booth in a computer show in my hometown. I can't remember the agent demonstrating anything touch-screen related though so maybe it was not a HP 150, but some other model. Or maybe thermal printers in top compartments were not that uncommon back then ?
The setups for the screen options allow for the definition of forms and fields. You can define a form layout and then only send/receive the user data. That mouse is the same as was used on the HP9000 workstations. I broke the left button on my first mouse when I discovered Tetris. The printer that this series of terminals/test instruments used was the original ink jet mechanism that had the internal code name "Vesuvius".
I will never use anything I learned here, but your enthusiasm has me stuck watching hour-long videos. thank you
This thing must have been expensive. HP at the top of their dev game before they got walloped by Apple & PC compatibles. All tech owes HP and Xerox an enormous debt of gratitude for their huge early leading r&d prowess.
Just started watching but I like those wide F keys like an Amiga... looks "right" to me as we were a Commodore family until well after they folded.
17:47 The botch-wire replacing the trace on the PCB might be to solve Issues of impedance, resistance and or capacitive stuff or something like that - I think I remember Bil Herd saying they had to do that on the A0 line of the Z80's adressbus in the C128 because of that.
There's the whole story: ;)
th-cam.com/video/STCGzanAyR0/w-d-xo.html&ab_channel=HACKADAY
I've always heard those called bodge wires not Balch wires but technically either one would be correct I don't know if which one is technically correct as I said either one would describe it and it's possible people think you're saying one even though your might be hearing the other any thoughts on this? Please comment.
I've seen that done on a cheap Taiwanese modem board in the 90's. The PC board was produced defective and one trace was shorted to something, so they simply cut both ends of the trace and used a bodge wire. The company I worked for had bought hundreds of these modems and every single one had the same cut trace and bodge wire patching the trace.
I worked at an electronics manufacturing division of a major defense contractor, and we had a PCB fabrication area. We'd have a run of boards with bad or shorted traces on an internal layer, and those jumpers were used to avoid the expense of scrapping the boards and making new ones. A few times a hole was drilled into or through the board to remove the short. Sometimes the feedthru for an IC pin would get drilled out and an eyelet would be installed in its place and wires run to it.
I didn't notice it on Adrian's boards, but on longer runs we'd tack down the wires with small dots of adhesive like RTV or epoxy.
@@scottlarson1548 Thats pretty common actually in older boards. Some cut trace here, some extra wires there. There are entire series of computers that have the same modification like that (Atari XE for example). It kind of looks excessive on this extention board though.
Outstanding detective work on that memory issue. I'm very impressed and enjoyed this video a lot.
Adrian, I must state to you that your troubleshooting skill is astounding. You have some seriously potent digital fault finding capabilities fine sir.
You totally earned the level of respect, which I reserve for only the creme de la creme. Well done Adrian. Thank you once again for taking us along with you on this fantastic voyage! You are really good at what you do brother. Fred
Wild how consistent HP has been with its logo/branding over the years (decades)
I worked in an office in the mid 1980's that had an HP150 set up like yours that was used mainly as a terminal to link in to ComShare. We also had some HP9836 workstations with external hard drives that were massive heavy things linked via HPIB.
I later used some of the early HP Vectras, including an RS25 (386 - 25 MHz machine) that I used as a web server for a few years! That had the HP HIL interface for the mouse and keyboard on it!
Yeah I saw some pics of those early Vectras and it seems they used the exact same keyboard as this machine. Fascinating!
Fun fact: This computer is featured prominently (along with a Symbolics 3600 and an Apple //c) in the 1985 film "Real Genius." It's used in the LASER lab to display telemetry data, as well as Kent's (Robert Prescott) primary computer in his dorm room.
You are a very smart man! HP has the best engendered machines, even their tablets are NOT glued together and for this reason alone it’s worth to purchase HP products. I got HP 200lx and I’m blown away what they have accomplished back then! Great video!
I worked at HP in the UK during the mid-1980's. The HP150 was the first "PC" I ever used. Loved the touch-screen on it.
At HP in Colorado Springs, the folks who had these took to putting scotch tape over the photoreceptors in the bottom of the monitor bezel to keep the dust out, otherwise they'd have to blow them out every so often.
I loved my HP 150. But hardly anyone else at HP did. They were not popular.
Fascinating! So it was a problem even when these were in use! Amazing only one was clouded with dust on this one.
Adrian's Digital Basement there was a plastic piece introduced to address the issue later in the 150A’s life.
Turns out those holes would clog with dust and dirt, especially the bottom row, so bad, the PCB had to be replaced.
The cover was flat on the top and on the bottom had round extrusions with a flat bottom that fit into the holes. It just laid on the bottom of the display. The other three sides remained unprotected.
The 12” 150B the “Touchscreen II” the touch was optional. A touch screen bezel could be user installed and was sealed on all four sides
My mom actually had one of those at home for her work back in the day . I remember playing on it as a kid. Very cool stuff for back then ❤
Oh my!...... Your detective skills are on a par with Columbo! Fantastic video
That thing is astonishing the technology HP put into it.. holy smokes how amazing! What a find!!
When you said the top is for a thermal printer, the shape immediately made sense. That rounded bump at the back is probably for the roll of thermal paper to sit in behind the printer module.
What a fascinating computer! I would never have guessed that the compartment on top of the monitor is for a printer. I wonder how many people used it as a lunch box to keep their food warm :)
HP-HIL supported lots of devices. Mice, keyboards, beepers, probably more that I never had.
Printer, cassette drive, barcode reader wand, HP-41 calculator, ...
6:00 Touchscreens in the 80's?! I gave a GBA to my young cousins to show them the old Pokemon games, and they kept trying to touch the screen instead of pressing the buttons 😂
That's sad.
He wasn't tapping the screen, he was trying to cover up the horrible latter-day Pokemon designs with his hands.
The Power on Test error 1000 was a very common issue on those units when they were in service. The row of holes along the bottom of the screen filled up with dust and often needed a small screwdriver or probe to stir up the dust and be blown out - so you did well to only have one LED blocked and to get it out with the air blaster. The LEDs themselves have also been known to fail , resulting in the same error. The 150 Touchscreen II had a plastic cover over the LEDs to prevent that problem - but not many units came with the touchscreen as it was an optional accessory. RAM failures are very common with the 150s - your use of debug is a great way to narrow down the fault!!
So I suppose it'll be important to keep a cover over this machine when storing it to help keep the dust out of the bottom row. Interesting!
@@adriansdigitalbasement As someone else mentioned further down in this thread, HP did release a plastic strip with clear 'plugs' that dropped into the holes on the bottom of the 150A screen to address the issue. They weren't that common but I do remember them from my days as an HP Customer Engineer. But yes, if you have a dusty environment, a cover would be a good idea.
Wow, I'm still amazed how the old HP equipment is reliable and user-friendly. Two years ago I was having lab classes using 70's HP phase generators - I still have no idea how those came to Poland due to a CoCom embargos (I'm a civilian student of military tech university). What's more funny, we've had got the same model of spectrum analizers, but every unit had the other brand: HP, Agilent and Keysight - that's just showing how well their instruments were made if they were so confident selling those
through all these years.
HP Lab stuff is awesome
Poland had its share of smugglers allowing some islands of technology to flourish. It had its risks and took guts for sure.
This is such an improvement over Adrian’s Analog Broom Closet
Hey, at least Roger Wilco got his space back after Adrian moved into the basement.
There you go: Yet another vintage machine fixed! Pretty soon the dead parts bin will be filled to the brim. Might need some expansion ;-)
Kudos Adrian; McGyver would be proud!
Unless I am missing something, I don't think part 2 talking about the floppy drives was ever released? Ack! Don't leave us hanging! 😀
Very nice! Thank you for walking us trough the hardware and all the troubleshooting process! Eager to see the next part regarding the disk drive module. The 80s were like a gold decade for HP, the company developed some interesting modular workstations (some were Unix based).
Nice job on the troubleshooting and application of logic and common sense to pinpoint the bad chip on the first try.
More HP - around this time I was a physics student and bought a HP-71B pocket computer-calculator - this was a fantastic device and, among other forward-looking things, featured surface mount ICs, one of the very first, if not THE first, devices to do so. Before Carly and Co. HP was one fantastic engineering outfit.
12:22 "It's extremely well engineered like all HP stuff is."
I have an HP Officejet 7410 All-in-One and it is designed so that if it detects a problem with either the black or color ink cartridge, it becomes a useless brick. The ink cartridges, which cost over $40 each, dry up in less than a year after they are installed, whether you use them or not. I stopped replacing the color ink cartridge years ago because I rarely used it. However, once while making black-and-white copies, I accidentally pressed the color copy button. At this point the machine detected the color ink had dried up and then refused to allow me to make any more black-and-white copies or use the machine for scanning or anything else. Fortunately, I had saved an old color ink cartridge that, while not having enough ink left to make a decent print, was miraculously accepted. I continued to use the machine for awhile until one day when the black ink prints were looking faded. I removed the black ink cartridge to examine it, but upon putting it back, the machine detected a problem and once again refused to function. Instead of shelling out the money for yet another ink cartridge that would probably dry up in less than a year, I decided to buy a Canon All-in-One laser printer for the cost of 3 black ink cartridges. I am happy to say that my new printer is many times faster than the HP and does not waste a few minutes "warming up" every time I turn it on. The HP also had a bunch of other annoying issues that I will not even mention here.
Due to the incredibly horrible software design / engineering of this particular machine, I have vowed never to buy another HP product ever again!
AFAIK nearly all modern inkjets are crap. I still use a DeskJet 812c, which although the lowest-end model of the series, still works fine today. The cartridge interface is well documented and, unlike a modern cartridge, has minimal smarts.
I know this is a very old video, but I'like to let you know that the HP-IL is a general serial bus ("HP Interface Loop") that may connect a lot of different peripherials to the machine. You could say it's a little bit like the IB but for a lmore light-weight ooped serial bus. So - not just a funny mouse connection. Both the available bus types were probably carefully selected by HP; quite some equipment for measurments and control used them, like HP oscillosopes and data recorders. W all that said - really nice to see the machine being taken care of; we should maintain some more respect of old technology and not just throw it away because it' not new any longer... I believe I've got a few HP-150 machines w both HD and FD units in good shape still stuffed away somewhere.
Perhaps I should also mention that the compatibility isn't entirely bad; long ago I actually transferred some binaries runnable on an standard DOS PC right to the HP150 and the exacuted just fine.
yeah, I don't know why less than 99%+ compatibility surprises anyone. All the machines of that period, including very nice ones like the DEC Digital Rainbow, Tandy 1000, etc, weren't fully compatible, with the exception of Compaq, even a couple of PCs which "pirated" the PC BIOS outright weren't "fully" compatible. Copyright of digital items hadn't been set in US law yet, Phoenix had not sold BIOS that would enable clone-makers, "ISA bus" didn't even have a name. The whole clone business didn't start until later, and didn't really pick up until Windows 3.1 came out. Although Basic was very compatible, most all being provided by Microsoft at the time. There was some expectation that homebrew Basic programs could be traded and shared.
Good job, great video.
Damn... HP had 6 layer boards and touchscreen in 1983...
It's amazing how technology that's ahead of it's time never cathches on to the public...
Excellent repair work Adrian!
Thanks for posting the HP museum link. Lots of interesting HP history on that site.
Your logical problem-solving skills and never-give-up attitude really were top notch in this one, Adrian! Really nice to watch and learn about the assembly tools to get at the memory level and see exactly what's happening and narrow down the problematic chips. The design of the HP 150 reminds me a lot of the early-gen Apple Mac's. This and the original 128K Mac were released just months apart. I wonder if any of the engineers/designers talked with each other. And I really like how over-engineered the HP 150 is. Everything's easy-access and the components go together with ease - like high-end servers. Wish that was true of today's components... Also, I was blown away when you did the close-up of the text on-screen. Those characters looked fantastic. Programming would be enjoyable! Anyways, thanks for the in-depth discussion on this amazing piece of HP engineering. Looking forward to part 2! Long live RPN!
I like these big episodes. I haven't heard of this computer before. The text on this monitor is so clear.
So you're still uploading regularly and YT just didn't show me ANY videos from you for like half a year to a year??
Touchscreen? Almost 40 years ago? Wow. (2000s kid with interest in old tech here)
Great work on the debugging, you managed to catch the interest of someone with ADHD for 50 minutes :)
Tyrion older than you are I’m in my 30s and I love old tech📼
Whoa! And here I thought my IBM 8516 was an early touch screen example!
EDIT: I'm very surprised how similar that keyboard and mouse are to the ones I use on my HP 9000/720 from nearly a decade later!
EDIT 2: Chassis and expansion cards are done in a very similar way as well!
Instantly recognize that incredibly uncomfortable HP mouse. Used from the graphics terminals on my college's 9000/300 servers all the way through the 425 machines and the 7xx workstations.
I loved our 712i machines because we could use normal PS/2 mice with them. One day the HP guy came out to upgrade the CPUs and I saw that inside that pizza box case they used foam to mount the disk drives. Broke my heart. Then Compaq bought HP and it all went to hell :(
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HP-HP9000-712-100-Workstation_01.jpg
@@grumble2009 was that HP Pizza top of the cage Pizza special sauce?
Or just sprinkling of extra Ram or a double Ram Pizza.
Glad you were able to fix it Adrian, I recall working with a few of those models, plus some similar ones and various HP terminals. That was back when they were new or at least not old. 😉
HPIL stands for HP Interface Loop; think of it as similar to the Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) but for more than just keyboards and mice. The HPIB / GPIB / IEEE-488 Bus was a great way to connect equipment together. Back in the late '70s to mid '80s I worked with automated test stations, computer driven test equipment used to test and troubleshoot electronic assemblies and systems. Using a computer program to control things like multimeters, frequency counters, function generators and even digital oscilloscopes with waveform analyzers made it easier to test batches of devices quickly. You still needed good troubleshooting skills (as you used for your RAM problem!) since you had to also understand what the test station was telling you and know when it was giving you a false indication.
Wow, you are a genius sir! most people would have given up and tossed it in the skip, you are a great inspiration indeed.
That's really some quality build from HP. So much different from those clones that were around back then. I'm really impressed by that 1983 engineering.
These units had two main uses:
1. A Terminal for HP and other main frames.
2. To run Very Expensive Lab Equipment like HP's Gas Chromatographs that often cost more then most expensive houses at that time.
Printer on top was common way to screen print of results for lab equipment or terminal sessions.
Not a good way to "print a book" or even a few pages. They were rarely used to compete with IBM PC and Clones for other business cases.
HP did not allow service beyond board swapping for many reasons. A big one is if anyone messes up the 150 and damage the lab equipment... That can cause Fatal problems to people using the systems. Chips in Sockets had big problems and easy to steal too. If you have to re plug hundreds of chips in a month just to get many IBM PC to boot you might know how bad this really is and that's even with the right tools.
Great troubleshooting video! That's such a wonderful and well engineered machine! Imagine touch screen and integrated printer in 1983!
The connector on the expansion card looks like a little happy face :D
I like your vintage computers and the way you fix the issues on it….
Life pro tip. Super clean old electronics/equipment help fix/make issues like that touchscreen apparent
My dad worked for HP and I think he was regional director for pc sales at the time. I had one of these at home complete with the thermal printer on top. I never saw one with a mouse though. I remember playing Zork on this. I typed all my school assignments in wordstar and printed them on a daisy wheel “letter quality” printer.
re: manually soldered wires ... I would suspect fixing timing issues, because in all the instances you point out the original traces have been cut not only as near as possible to the soldering points, but always at both ends. This makes sense if you need to avoid any signal reflections which would otherwise happen if you leave one end or both ends connected.
IZ8DWF thinks that it is because of crosstalk issues in that six layer board due to those existing traces being too close to another trace right under it.
Awesome display of "technicianing." Love your enthusiasm Adrian.
that's impressive , i mean they've made such a great technology which we're still using it today , didn't know that this tech was that old , good job HP
I was given the task of evaluating a Vectra in 1985 for our team PCs. It was definitely not 100 percent compatible and required its own OEM version of DOS. However, it was a great pleasure to use, extremely well made, and beautiful to look at. It had a 80286 running at 8 MHz. It had a very excellent keyboard which was every bit as good as the IBM model M but much quieter. The symbols were molded into the keys, as on their calculators. We nixed it due to lack of full compatibility but I got to keep the evaluation unit as my terminal (most of our work was done on minis and mainframes).
The 1985 Vectra certainly looks pretty boring compared to this machine -- but I guess that's what it meant to be a PC compatible back then. I see from pictures it used the same keyboard as the HP 150, which is neat.
The graphic arts and architectural supply store Charrette used to use these as terminals throughout their store. The employees used them for access to their inventory system on their mini- computer.
The bus wire may have been used to avoid etch shorts. There may have been some kind of contamination, or fine copper threads on the boards that required cutting the etches and rerouting wires around those locations. I ran into that as a PCB tech. The company had a batch of boards that had some contamination of some kind that "grew" together and caused the address bus to short out. After the issue was discovered, etches were cut and bus wire was run around those places.
I think HP holds the crown for least ergonomic mouse. Early mice weren't known for their comfort, but only HP seems to have gone on the offensive against their users. Another great video sir, rock on!
Track cuts and wire straps that look like a waste of time may be because of signal cross-coupling, or noise. They might have cut them for testing/debugging and then needed to put them back. All before the days when EMC became a big thing.
I remember this unit very well. Worked with several examples at the time.
Another thing to consider on touch screens of this type is LED lighting pulses can confuse the sensors just like they do on the PCJr keyboard. Also some newer computers with touch screens (like 2010's era) can go haywire if the screen refresh rate and touch scan rate are not in sync. I've seen this on Dell XT2 laptops and some Dell all-in-ones where the cursor jumps wildy around with older video drivers and newer drivers fix it.
this machine wasn't presumably aimed at consumers...
I think this would have been used in a production environment for spec-testing bedcause lots of measuring equipment used HP-IB back in the day, like Multimeters and Oscilloscopes
I guess this might have been a place for quality control with an automated test setup for some kind of production line, and a worker used the touchscreen for ease of use in the production environment and the printer at the top might be for example as a quality control measure like QC Passed stickers but with the actual readings if the device is in spec or not for example...