1981 CAD Monster - HP Series 200 9836C 

My uncle was an architectural engineer and he had an HP9836 CAD workstation + HP 7440 plotter printer that he used well into the 1990s. I recall HP techs working on it during one visit and watching them replace caps to keep it working. My uncle abandoned it only when Softdesk was purchased by Autodesk which then summarily dropped all support for the "ancient" CAD software my uncle used.

It's something how getting color on your computer used to be impossible, then a big cost consideration, then it became commonplace, and now we just strap rainbow lights onto computers for fun.

Hi. Great video resurrecting this historic computer. I wrote the RMB graphics drivers in pascal. It was my first software project at HP. Before that I was responsible for qualifying the Tandon floppy drives. You wouldn’t believe what they sent us. The color map was a rather last minute addition to the product specs. It did make it more fun considering how slow the graphics drawing speed was. Much of the graphics primitives were in assembly so it went as fast as it possibly could.

Oh boy, blast from the past! I was in one of HP's IC departments back in the day (Hi fellow LID IC -ites!) and we used the 9836 series for IC CAD. Some fun facts: 1) The 256KB memory board was nick-named "Quarter Pounder" Of course, the 1MB memory board was the "Pounder" 2) The 9845B (predecessor to the 9836A/C) was used by Colin Cantwell for the Death Star walk through in Star Wars. 3) Later, Cantwell used the 9836C to create "A day in Loveland, CO" which walked through a full summer day. A view of the mountains started out with the sunny morning, went to an afternoon thunderstorm (lightning included!) then on to evening. Absolutely stunning, all done with palette manipulation. If you can find this, get it archived!!! 4) We (actually, Tom Baker) used the UCSD Pascal system (later Modcal - Pascal with module extensions) to write an IC CAD layout system, nicknamed Piglet (HP Integrated Graphics Local Editing Terminal). Piglet was eventually rewritten in C and released as a PC Board layout system. That should be out there somewhere. When I left HP in 1995, C Piglet was still being used for IC layout. By then it had migrated to HPUX workstations. 5) There was a internal game of Centipede written for the 9836C. I doubt it is available anywhere, but I brought a 9836C home to play it. It gave my wife nightmares after she played it! 6) By the time the 9800 series 200 was done, they were using the Motorola MC68040. I seem to recall those being in the later revs of the 9836C, but I'm probably wrong about that. All in all, lots of fond memories of the 9836C and its descendants.

Exactly what I would expect from a Tier 1 manufacturer back in the day: everything is custom, nonstandard and eye-wateringly expensive! Having said that, I absolutely love the blocky design aesthetic. My Bachelor's degree dissertation project was to read HPGL design files (on a MicroVax II) and display them on a Tektronix graphics display terminal which also had a separate text display plane over the rendered images. The images took minutes to generate as even with compiled Pascal (the host machine was a 5MHz 32-bit lump - seriously expensive at the time!) the program had to squirt the terminal's ASCII control commands down a 9600 baud serial line. Not only that but the program had to parse the HPGL twice - firstly to work out the size of the final design so it could calculate a scale to fit into the terminal's 1024x1024 graphics capability and then to send the commands to the terminal doing the floating point scaling as it went. Kids these days could do the same thing 100 times faster on their mobile phones! 😂

I love how the computer essentially has nearly 500 times more memory than a VIC20, which would have been also available. Blows one's mind.

I used to be a Systems Engineer at HP for these machines. They were fantastic and extraordinarily well built. Although I enjoyed the video, there is lots of incorrect info. While it was popular for CAD, it was more often used for instrument control (at least in my part of the world). As mentioned by others, the BASIC environment was incredible; I wish a similar BASIC was available now. Full schematics were available so that lots of users built custom cards for it. For its time it was magnificent. Being the top of the line it sold in smaller numbers than its less expensive brethren (9816, 9826). Thanks for the trip down memory lane!

I was an HP field service Engineer back in the 80s/90s we used these to run our calibration software on Network/Spectrum analysers like the HP8510 . The 9826 series was similar but not as powerful with a built in display but only one drive. HP was the best company in the world to work for as an Engineer.

Your excitement is infectious. It reminded me of all the days and nights as a kid I spent tearing apart old computers and getting excited every time I learned something new.

I love the deep dive you take for old tech. I really appreciate the effort.

I enjoyed this video so much that I watched the whole entire thing. If you get actual CAD software working on this thing one day, I look forward to hearing about it from you.

My dad was an architectural engineer and owned his own business. He is first computer in the 1960s was the Olivetti Programma 101 but he switched to HP when the HP85 was available in 1980. A few years later he bough an HP9836C. And what a beast it was. The Graphic capabilities where unseen at that time.

I work as an engineer and a lot of the older engineers/designers I work with refer to CAD workstations as "Tubes" I know it refers to the CRT display, but I always wondered what a CAD workstation would've looked like back when that was a contemporary term.

Shelby's determination and focus never ceases to amaze me.

This was HP's first computer that I know of to use a non-HP processor. An electronics shop I frequented quite often- and where I got my 5150 and PS/2 Model 25- had one in the front of the store.

IBM offered a workstation option for the 5150. It had an updated graphics card roughly on par with SVGA for a whopping 10k extra dollars. It was specifically to be a cad station.

In 1984 I went to work for HP in the Desktop Computer Division, working on learning products as well a the port of Bell Labs System V Unix to Series 200 and Series 500. My own desktop was a HP 9836C, just like this one. Viewers may know there were two OS offerings, Rocky Mountain BASIC and Pascal Workstation. Later on HP-UX was released on this platform. My next job was field sales & tech support, and later business development for the installed base of these customers. Ultimately I was the Product Marketing Manager for Motorola 6800 based family of products, and all older products still in support life (think the HP 9825, 9835, 9845, Series 200, 300, and 400). HP was a really great company in those years, and we had “invent” in everything we did. If it is useful to your channel, I’d be glad to help with questions or share stories both about the great people behind these products, and our brilliant customers who bought and used them. It was great to see this fun trip into the past!

This is an incredible machine for 81. I'm old enough to have been involved in the early 80s home computing boom here in the UK. Clearly this machine is a completely different level in terms of its original cost and intended use, but I had no idea of this or its ilk's existence. My Brother works for HP - I'll send him this and see if he or his workmates know it! Great Video!

its so retro it looks futuristic,i remember when a friend brought back a 486 and a 386 from america they where insanely expensive,we downloaded doom from a bbs took forever,and then we transferred it via parallel cable to the second computer so we could play together...my mind was blown.

That is a super interesting machine! I live that time period. So many different implementations of various ideas in play. Lots to learn about.

This brought back memories. You are right, the HP9836C was a beast, back in the day. We ran them on Pascal to test missile hardware. The ones I remembered had a Boot Rom Card, and all we had to load was the program via the floppy. These test stations had all types of instruments connected to the computer, they were very large. I'll be looking out for the next video.

This was absolutely amazing. My father was into all these old machines back in the early 80's, from Superbrain CP/M machines to Cromemco System 3 with 4 8 inch floppy drives. I was a very young kid playing on these systems and learned BASIC and how to use CP/M back then. My dad had used all this stuff to make a point of sale system and parts lookup for his Honda/Kawasaki motorcycle dealership in like 1983 which is absolutely INSANE to think how forward thinking that was. He made his own software in BASIC from books full of program listings, making modifications, even had transferred parts libraries from HONDA from mainframe format to old 10 MB hard drives. He spent tens of thousands on all that stuff. I remember he told me he paid like $3000 for a 10mb hard drive that was in a whole separate box - I can close my eyes and still remember seeing it from when I was maybe 6 or 7.

Fantastic, just this video alone made my monthly internet payment worth it, it brought back memories from 40 years ago when I used an HP-85 to run RF circuit simulation to design filters, antennas and many other related circuits, thanks for making stuff like this !

Thank you for this video! What a fascinating machine. To this day, HP has kept the simple, professional, blocky look of their workstations and I quite like it. I've worked with HP's workstations going back to the mid 1990s but unfortunately never seen something like this in person.

i remember our first family computer, it had 8 megs of ram and a 133mhz processor in it, and that was in 1997... totally wild to see this beast in action with more ram and processing power than i knew could exist in one system in 1981... these are great videos, you do them so well!!! great work!!!

For the instrument geeks out there. HPIB became GPIB when it became a wider standard.

During my first paying job as a programmer around 1983, I worked on the HP 9836A. I got to know that machine and its cousins very well. The company was called ICG (Integrated Computer Graphics), and they did architectural software (yes, in BASIC) for the home building market. Basically, you would enter the blueprints for a house, and our software would tell you how much it would cost to frame that house in wood. It kicked out schematic drawings, bills of materials, and cut lists. It was chiefly used by pre-fab home manufacturers who would frame the walls on a giant table in a factory, then truck the walls out to the building site and tilt them up. One of the features I wrote was to print out a 1:1 scale ribbon to be taped up on the edge of the assembly table showing exactly where the studs, cripples, and other framing members were to be placed (and there's a weird debugging story behind that one). I retained no copies of this software, nor do I know anyone who did. Since one of my burning interests at the time was 3D graphics, I wrote some subroutines that rendered the framing schematics as a 3D wireframe. It made the lead programmer happy, as it confirmed that the framing data inside the program was "real." You're not missing much with the Pascal environment. It's basically an implementation of UCSD Pascal, and it's _awful_ -- the very definition of user-hostile. More interesting is the MC68000 assembly language development environment. I used it to learn 68K assembly language (just in time for the Amiga), and used it to write a bootable version of Conway's Game of Life. I *_might_* still have a copy of this (the game, not the dev environment)... The disk format is very primitive. Each catalog entry is basically a filename, a starting offset, and a sector count. There is no sector map -- all files are laid out contiguously. This means you have to re-pack the disk files from time to time.

Very cool. We had at least 4 of these computers donated to my college lab from HP. We wrote our our cad program and tons of test measurement software. Mostly in pascal. I converted most of those to an HP RISC machine later on. We used the RS232 for all data transfer, writing our own software on both sides. There were many expansion cards. One had a programming language on it. Might have been BASIC. We also had an external hard drive connected to it. And used the HP-IB to connect to all our testing stations. One of our computers had all the 1MB memory cards in it. It was a beast.

Was great to see this. I was able to use a 9836 in the early 80's when I was a co-op student working for a research unit in a company that later spun into PMC Sierra. I wrote a fairly large (for the day) simulation in HP Basic. I think I have the printout in my work term report filed away someplace. It was such a cool machine- loved that rotary scroll wheel when programming.

This thing essentially runs Rocky Mountain Basic (rmb). That is still around and sold by a company called Transera. It goes under the name HTbasic and is still being actively developed ! Hewlett Packard's RMB is not your garden variety basic. RMB can do matrix transforms, supports complex and imaginary numbers, fourier transforms, urve fitting and a whole slew of mathematical operations. it also has an extensive graphics and plotting instruction set. Displaying and editing charts, tables, graphs is a snap. RMB contains instructions you will not find in any other programming language unless you load libraries or toolkits. RMB has it built- in and part of the language ! The Windows implementation (HTbasic) can run existing code unmodified, but adds a ton of new capabilities , including driving test equipment over LXI (LXI is essentially GPIB over a Lan connection). No need to configure anything : simply issue a read or write command to a "port". The GPIB subsystem behaves as a virtual file. You open the file with the given address and simple read and write. There is no doubt, somwhere in a corner of a huge telescope control room , or military aircraft support cart or similar long-lifespan equipment, one of these still chugging away running 40 year old code on 40 year old hardware , or on a pc running windows 11 with HTbasic. These machines pushed the boundaries of what was possible in the 80's so hard they ended up still being used in 2023.

It's always a good day when Tech Tangents uploads!

This is a fantastic blast from the past, well done 👍

I find it amazing that people like yourself can resurrect old 80s pcs like this meanwhile im struggling trying to get a hdd to register on a 486 so i can load dos 6.22 lol

I love old HP equipment. They didn't do anything by half!

That machine is beyond awesome! 2.7 Mbytes of RAM was unimaginable at the time.

Your explanation of the disk interleave is close, but a little off. The additional time afforded by staggering the sectors was not because the computer was not fast enough to process the data, Remember, the circuits are typically an order of magnitude or faster than the physical hardware in the drive. The issue was when the next sector was on a different track and the drive arm had to reposition. That at least how it worked when I was using Spinrite a little later on the PC for harddisks. I never saw it used on floppy disk drives before. The original Mac used that crazy scheme to get extra data on the outer tracks and change the arrangement on the inner tracks on the disk drive. Watching you work with the original equipment from when I was a kid is a real pleasure. Your channel is great!!!

We used several of these where I worked (Memorex applied research for disk drives). We did not get them or use them for CAD. Instead we got them to interact with HPIB & GPIB instrumentation because no test instruments existed that could measure what we needed. We also used them for computer based simulations. I recall it being a good deal less than $25,000 so we probably didn't have all the bells & whistles. Comparing the price directly to other computers of the day is very misleading for two reasons (a) the 98x6 came with hardware that the others did not and was expensive to add (b) the build in hardware, such as the HPIB, had very easy to use drivers built in; other computers required massive amount of time to write software to integrate & use such features. For example, PCs needed different graphics software for different graphical capabilities: CGA vs EGA, vs VGA - rewrite when you changed yet all seamless with HP; Want to change from a 1 pen plotter to an 8 pen plotter with HP: disconnect and replace - done! We were in the business of developing disk drive technology, not screen/plotter/interface/whatever software. We did a hard look at the cost of HP 9836C versus an Apple IIe(?) - HPO hardware was clearly more expensive but the cost of adding just the driver software to the Apple negated that. I recall in my lab we had the following attached: plotter. printer, logic analyzer (Biometrics??), Tektronics digitizing oscilloscope, frequency analyzer, laser interferometer, a custom HPIB card, and a GPIO to directly control the test stand for disk seeking & read/write.

01:40 "The 9836 is essentially a direct continuation [of the Series 80]"... Not really, as they were designed and made by different divisions: the Series 80 came from Corvallis Division in Oregon (which was the calculator division spun out of the Advanced Products Group in Cupertino in the mid 70s), while the 9836 came from the Desktop Computer Division in Fort Collins, Colorado, building on the earlier desktop calculators such as the 9825. If you compare the HP BASIC that each machine uses, you'll find they have significant differences, to the point where even syntax for many simple commands is incompatible. This is because they were developed independently, with no over-arching HP computing strategy to tie things together. Any similarities are more like convergent evolution than any kind of descendant relationship. (FYI: I worked a lot with HP in the 80s and 90s, and was a heavy user and developer on 200 Series, 500 Series and 80 Series machines, as well as a developer for HP-41 & HP-71, and worked at Corvallis division for a time.)

Amazing machine but also amazing to realise that within 4-5 years the Amiga and ST did more for a tiny fraction of the price. The pace of evolution with tech in the 80's was breath taking.

please make more videos with this machine. maybe someone on vcfed has some more software they could image for you? i'd really love to see you use it with a plotter and a CAD program

I love this kind of videos! Thanks so much for sharing!

I remember my friend's dad having something similar at work. He was using it to design communications towers and stress measures. It may have been an earlier model as before he was assigned it, he was given a presentation first batch new era Motorola CPU (to memory it was the 68000) that was at the heart of the computer. One of the demos on the computer he showed me and his son was a planet gravity simulator.

I worked in Aerospace in the late 70s, early 80s and the HP Controllers were used for automated testing of control systems using the HPIB. I worked with the predecessor, the HP 9835 and later the 9826. I don't remember using a 9836, but I know I've seen one. I remember seeing one in an "old parts" storage area and I would love to get my hands on it.

That beautiful machine is in the right hands. Excellent video! I hope we see more of this unique computer!

Your passion is palpable. Excellent peek into the past.

Hi - Thank for you video, as it brought back some faded memories. Back in the day - mid-1980s - I was an engineer at a large HP site, not the one that built the 9836C, but one that used extensive amounts of this equipment. Note that none of the Series 200 computers were used for CAD, but rather for testing, or instrument and process control. HP BASIC was an interpreted language based on an HP version of Pascal called MODCAL. HP BASIC had essentially one command string per line and a maximum of allowable program lines. Since it was interpreted, the labels could be stripped away, essentially obscuring what the program was doing. There was a CAD program called HP Draft which was a 2D drafting program that would run on a series 200, but it was elementary. The Series 300 computers, running Pascal on HPUX and coupled with a TurboSRX graphics engine was a very capable 3D CAD work platform using a application called Solid Designer. Our division had dozens of 340/TurboSRX workstations networked together. Eventually, early 2000’s or so, PTC bought Solid Designer and rebranded it as Direct Design.

This is fantastic! Never heard of these and don't even remember seeing them in any of my computer magazine articles of the day! Excellent find!

If you would like a maxed out SRAM card, please let me know. I still have some available from a run I did a while back. 7.5MB is the max ram you can put in a 200 series machine, and these boards let you do that in a single slot, and are much faster (essentially 0 wait state) than the DRAM boards I've tested. I have an SRM server, which is a slightly modified 200, and the one card I wish I could get software for is the 80286 DOS Coprocessor board. I have only heard back from one person who thinks they have the tape with the software but wasn't willing to dump it or send it off to someone who had the capability to dump it.

the wobblyness of the table is driving me nuts for months now

Great find! And an excellent job of resurrection. I worked at HP starting in 1979 -- not on the 98426/9836/Series 200 you show here, but on its "big brother," the Series 500. The 9836 was designed in the building next door. It's hard to imagine what it was like back then, before ANYthing was standardized. When we started on the 9826 & 500, there was no standard to design to. The IBM PC was still a glimmer in IBM's eye, there were no standard disk formats, even basic things like Ethernet and TCP/IP were still a few years away. So we had to invent EVERYTHING from scratch, custom everything. That was the biggest reason these beasties were so eye-wateringly expensive. Many many things were done VERY differently than what we're used to today. The Series 200/300 family was a very well-engineered and successful product, a great match for its target market. The Series 500 had amazing engineering but was much too expensive for the market, so the 200/300 won. But in an era when multi-processing was unknown and you had to reprogram DIP switches to add a RAM card, the 500 supported full multi-processing on multiple CPUs -- power down, plug in a couple of cards, power up, and shazam you magically had more RAM and more CPUs. Unheard-of at the time. It used a custom-designed CPU, I believe the very first 32-bit CPU-on-a-chip, with a stack-based architecture, believe it or not. The BASIC implementation had tech like run-time (just-in-time) compilation. It was amazing engineering but it missed the market. When it was clear the 500 was going to fail, a friend and I suggested a new product direction for the hardware -- "There's this thing called UNIX ..." So the 500 and then the 300/9836 became the first platforms for HP-UX, one of the first commercial UNIX implementations. You should find a copy of HP-UX for your 9836!

That thing really looks like it was the progenitor of the hp9000/200 series. I'm guessing it lacks the MMU required to run HP-UX?

Beautiful machine and you did it justice even without the cad demo. Great work!

There were "hpcat" and "hpcopy" DOS programs that could read and write the HP's "LIF" format as used by the 200. You had to format the floppies on the 200, then you could read/write them on a DOS PC. I probably still have these somewhere.

Man what a blast from the past. I ran on of those stations back in 86/87 I believe the Company I worked for bought the system in 84 or 85. Racking my brain to remember the cad software we used. I remember the company was bought out by Carrier corperation (Pretty sure). We had two 9836c stations connected to a hard disk that was the size of a 2 drawer file cabinet with a tape drive on top. I Think it was a 7933 drive 400 mb. and a 8 pin hp plotter. I was told the whole system set the company back $100k, back when I made $5.50 an hour. We used it till 1989 when we switched to pc's on a token ring network with dual Sun Sparc servers/ Workstations. And AutoCadd. with DCA.

I've heard about this computer, but never saw one before. This is just freaking wild to see.

Very interesting video, I love seeing these obscure old workstations still running today, great job =D

I loved the microwave aesthetic of the CRT.

These were mostly used as lab computers connected to the various HP instruments. I used them at Fairchild Semiconductor connected to HP Semiconductor Parameter Analyzer. We controlled the instrument, plotted the data, stored the data and did some basic statistics on the data. We had several of them in our dept. Other groups had them connected to other electronic test equipment doing similar things. We added a 10MB hard drive to ours.

HP was a beast of a company in the 80s. Carly Fiorina utterly destroyed it by sheer ignorance. Never underestimate the stupidity of bean counters…

Glorious... That old IBM reminded me of my first childhood computer ... in like 1995. Glorious BASIC.

I started working at HP in 1989, so I missed this period by a few years - what a beauty!

Hey man just found your channel. Watched this video and really enjoyed. Don’t know computers but like the way you explained things. 25 Grand from ‘81. Insane.

I loved these machines - 9836 and 9826! I implemented many ATE applications, besides doing precision analogue filter design with a program called CIRCAN. And of course there was a super word processor from UCLA! The IBM PC was like taking a step back in time! Those 9836 days were happy days!

My wife use to work with these machines, brought back memories

in 1985 my brother-in-law owned a video rental store, I remember getting dibs on the latest VHS videos as they came in. One day, this slick guy walked into the store and sold my brother-in-law a $10K HP computer with another $5K in software and keyboard and mouse and another $3K for onsite technical support and another $1k for training for a few hours. A lot of damn money in 1985! But he was making lots of money at his rental store! he still has that computer somewhere at home and sometimes we talk about the most expensive computer on earth that never worked hahaha 🤭

Early 80's we had a HP3000 at my university ..I fell in love with HP technology while learning Fortran . It was so good .. This is why i collect HP Led watches mainly HP-01

I see why that's your favorite computer! It's pretty amazing and I'd love to see more of it.

I remember building a floppy exerciser for those drives lol That is a system I have never had the privilege of using or servicing, it looks super interesting. When you were talking about the palette swapping demo I was thinking about the Amiga Boing Ball demo. Thank you for sharing.

Quite nice paperweight or brick. All custom, and very difficult to find and expensive even today. Nice video 👌

Great video. My first job was programing a HP9826, with the smaller monitor than the HP9836, in HP-BASIC. Nice computer and also a nice BASIC.

From the days when HP made products designed by engineers FOR engineers. Function and maintenance was everything, cost was a secondary issue.

Great video. If I recall correctly my dad used one of these or one very similar in the early 90s. It was used for inventory management and printing.

finally done ! as usual after all the dust.. blood, sweat and tears invested in it :D

Awesome s#it! Especially getting the 3,5 images to work by emulating on the socket 370 pc. Very nice video, fascinating machine and a pleasure to watch, thank you for doing all that!

Wow! Between 1980 and '84 I worked as a tech on the assembly lines for 9825s, '26s and '36s. I tested and repaired them before they were shipped. I became intimately familiar with their architecture and witnessed the evolution from "desktop calculator" to "workstation" first-hand. Depending on your need you could run HPL, RMB, Pascal or HP-UX. One big innovation was memory mapping which allowed much more memory than the processor could directly address. HP had partnered with Motorola for early access to new processor designs. My role in that agreement was to detect errors and, using a logic analyzer (HP, of course), determine the exact sequence of instructions that led to to a failure. I built my own '36 from reject parts (remember that Johnny Cash song about the Cadillac?). It was not uncommon then to find an open in a trace in a multi-layer PCB. We could add a jumper wire, but if too many jumpers were required, the board was rejected. I had no case parts, except for the bezel of the keyboard which had a nasty gouge in it. I had no display unit, but my my wife came home from a garage sale with a small monochrome monitor and I was able to soup it up to handle the higher bit rate. The characters were small and a bit blurry, but readable. I tipped the card cage on end and mounted it on a wooden plank so it would require a smaller footprint and not need a fan. HP auctioned off some obsolete equipment to employees and I got a thermal printer for less than $2 as I recall. It had once retailed for over $5K. I had very little software, however, and once I had a PC there was no looking back, so I finally trashed the "9836X".

My first computer at work was a HP 9845 B build in 1980, very similar and a bit bigger with 2 CPUs (16 bit as far as I remember). I loved this machine. HP offered also a C version which had a color monitor. We used the 9845 until around 1992, when the repair fees had gone up to standard 1000 $ (even when only a 5 ct worth small lamp in the tape drive, sensing the end of tape, had to be replaced). I enjoyed your video, especially the sequence of taking apart brought back memories of my own repair sessions with the 9845 which looks quite similar inside. Thanks for this great video!👍

Really enjoyed this, yr a brilliant dude! Thanks for sharing.

Man, you are just like some of my best friends. Computers are our drug. I could kick it with you any day. Love the enthusism, I used to work part time as a repair tech for a computer recycling company here in Tulsa, I spend my entire check every week on some amazing finds. My best so far was a Corona Portable PC (Suitcase) Computer with integrated 8 inch amber crt and a 5-1/4" Hd floppy drive and the keyboard seconded as the front cover of the computer chassis. Good Times.

Just found your channel! Even tho I'm a 90s kid, I love the combination of familiarity and nostalgia yet still new and interesting explanations and breakdowns.

The cool thing about this type of video is the awesome comments 😁 I soooo wanna go back to the 80's 😁 As I type this, I am developing code on the RPi Pico but running PicoMite BASIC (interpreter) and overclocked to 378MHz. Since the 80's, BASIC coding has been paying my bills 💪👍

First video of yours I've seen. I enjoyed it a lot as it interesting history. Loved the dot matrix printer credits.

Dude, this machine brings me back. The school I went to in the early '90s had one of these for the CAD class. It was used as a network Master machine that the Amiga 2000s were networked into. I miss working on those machines.

Fantastic video and explanation really appreciate your time and efforts sharing something so interesting really loved it brought back memories

Wonderful video, thank you so much for providing such great coverage for such an obscure machine. Excellent work, thank you!

This was the computer used for the absurd Tim and Eric Awesome Show "Cinco Midi Organizer" skit. I have long wondered what it was. Thank you for sharing info about this interesting piece of HP computing history.

I spent a year on a project programming the HP 9836 in the early 1980s for statistical process control - we wore out the left corner keyboard finishing because that is where we placed our left hand while spinning the cursor wheel. We also had a 10megabyte hard drive that cost $$$$

OMG! You take me back 40 years. I recall RESTORE but I don't remember what it does.

I love your video! I enjoy looking at vintage computer hardware. Welp, after having subscribed, I have plenty to keep me busy watching. Thank you!

I remember as a kid looking at Tandy computers in the early 1980s and they started at $2000 in Australia - it may was as well have been $20,000 for all the average teenager could afford. Thank God for Commodore and Jack Tramiel.

I worked with one of these early in my career (circa 1984), and a 9826 also. We used it to write and execute BASIC programs for test equipment. It was built like a battleship and had a distinctive look and feel of quality. I still remember my confusion as the senior engineer I worked with continually referred to it as a "calculator".

This brought me memmories. I worked for Hewlett-Packard between 1985 and 1992. The inside of these machines were very similar.

This is Nerdvana - Love your channel - learning a lot 🙂

I get the warm and fuzzies watching Canadian retrocomputing videos. It's like Canada is a cozy land stuck in the 90s.

Very Impressive, thanks for all that hard work, I would have really loved to see how those systems run CAD on an 8MHz Processor.

The only times I've had to deal with drive sector interleaving, was when low-level formatting MFM and RLL HDDs on PC XTs. Of course when IDE or ATA HDDs became a thing, those were factory low-level formatted, and so interleaving wasn't a consideration.

How do you only have 183K subscribers man? Great work!

Holy moly! What a blast from the past. In my late teens, I programmed for Lear Siegler. They had one of these critters and I played a game on it that I later re-implemented in 3D for Second Life. For the day, that HP was a remarkable computer.

Nice! My high school drafting class had one of these in the mid 80s

Oh my, what a blast from the past. I have one of those in climate controlled storage, just can't remember the state. I know I have everything for it. Terms of system disks and such. It was a wonderful machine. I created guitar, violin, etc. Components on it. I don't know as I recall I did everything in basic but I can't recall. Hopefully my kids didn't get into that unit and sell everything in there.

I had a ZX81 and wrote a block drop game in machine code. Amazing little machine.