Wayne,

   Like you, I also miss the HP-1000.  I was introduced to HP computers and
IMAGE on an HP-1000 (RTE-6/VM) around 1983.  Up until a few years ago, we
were still using the HP-1000 for some of our shop floor data collection.
The system was about 15 years old when we finally retired it.  I believe we
had a whopping 256K of RAM in the beast and 130Mb of disk.  We had a dozen
or two other HP-1000's in another group which were used to control some
automated test equipment.  I believe some of those systems are still
running, and should be celebrating their 20th birthday soon.  I too was
disappointed to hear that HP had discontinued the systems.

   That's the HP I used to know.

David N. Lukenbill




Wayne,

Thanks for mentioning my beloved HP1000. This box was the love of my life,
computer-wise.  From a very early age, I was fascinated by the empowerment
of pushing a switch and causing some physical event. Building process
control systems with the HP1000 was naturally a real thrill for me.

HP did extend the HP1000 many decades past their original drop-dead date,
even introducing the A990.  At first, they tried to foist some special
unix-ish box on us as a replacement, but it just wouldn't respond to
interrupt-driven events as well.

And, talk about a highly-configurable OS!  RTE/HP1000 has been used as
embedded controllers for banking ATMs, full-on business systems, data
acquisition and process control of about everything, keeping offshore oil
rigs afloat, switching telephone equipment, testing custom space probe
batteries......... (and on and on).

The HP1000 would tolerate humidity around 10% to 90%, temperature about 40F
to over 100F. Didn't like fast temp swings, though.

There are still many HP1000s in use today. Even a few RTE-6 boxes, I
believe. Gee, I miss her!

-dtd






[log in to unmask] on 09/06/2001 10:23:00 PM
To:     David T Darnell, [log in to unmask]@Internet
cc:
Subject:        Re: The demise of MPE?

Dave wrote:
"...I'm curious to know what happenned to other computer lines absorbed by
HP.

The one that comes to mind right now is Apollo..."

The Apollo family of computers was replaced by the HP-9000 Series 400
systems
(Motorola 68xxx CPUs) which ran various HP operating systems as well as the
old Apollo Domain operating system.  Domain was dropped along with the
Series
400s when HP shifted it's technical computers to HP-UX and PA RISC CPUs
such
as the Series 700 machines.

Related to the discussion of how HP treats some older operating systems is
their recent ending of the HP-1000 family and the RTE operating system.  It
made sense to me to port RTE to the PA-RISC architecture but that did NOT
happen.  Bye bye RTE.

Wayne Boyer
Cal-Logic

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