Neil after Joe:

>>We are upgrading to a S/969 soon and will have to upgrade
>>our existing HP-IB 7980 tape drive to SCSI and the upgrade
>>kit is $7000 (HP list price)

>You won't have to upgrade if you put an HP-IB card into the 969.
>Although it won't be "supported", it works and probably cost a
>lot less than $7000.  Also, your HP-IB printers will continue to work.

As Neil said, HP-IB will work on a 9X9 box;  BUT:  It's not officially
supported.  We have been running our 2563B line printer on our
959KS/200 via HP-IB for nearly two years now;  works fine;  lasts a
long time ( (C) Denys).  My colleague Steve Dirickson proved by
exhaustive testing that not only printers but also discs and tapes
will work on HP-IB on 9X9's;  HOWEVER:  Don't think I'd want to
run discs on an unsupported interface unless it was just a crash-
and-burn machine.  Whether or not you want to try and run a tape
drive via HP-IB is your call.

One additional factoid I will throw in for HP-IB on 9X9 boxes while
I think of it:  Although peripherals seems to work O.K., be warned
that there are some things you can run that will be distinctly un-
happy to find an HP-IB card in a 9X9 chassis...  One or more of the
SYSDIAG utilities, for example (forget which one(s); Steve probably
remembers):  Run the wrong one on that path and you will crash
your system....

Ken Sletten