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HP9825.COM
The Story of the Little
Computer That Could!
# Home Prehistoric Times The 9100 Project Prologues The 9825 Projects Epilogues *
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Home Revised 5/8/06
NMOS II
Hybrid [Framed_HP9825_Front_View]
Microprocessor Showtime: The Third-Generation Desktop Computers
Reliability
9825
Industrial Design
HPL The first-generation HP 9100A established the market for programmable
DC100 Tape scientific calculators and broke the ice for automated instrument
Internal Printer control. The second-generation machines--the HP 9810, 9820, and
LED Display 9830--segmented and grew these markets. By 1972, when HP introduced
Interfaces the HP 9820 and 9830, the company knew that it had established a
Peripherals major new product category. The Loveland Calculator Division started
Fred Wenninger planning for the next generation.
The Loveland engineers understood that the success they had already
achieved in the market would attract competitors. In true HP fashion
(for that era), they intended to fight these expected competitors
with huge technological leaps that would place substantial barriers
in the way of any company that tried to challenge HP in the
desktop-computing and instrument-control arenas.
The Loveland Calculator Division planned to make numerous
technological breakthroughs across a wide front, thus placing as many
obstacles in the way of competitors as possible. At the top of the
list for technological leaps was the advancement of the in-house NMOS
IC fabrication process that produced the 4Kbit ROMs used to store
operating systems and language compilers in the second-generation
calculators.
The next version of NMOS would not only supply bigger ROMs but logic
chips as well, starting with an integrated 16-bit microprocessor
based on the HP 211x architecture to replace the 4-board serialized
processor that Chuck Near had developed for the second-generation
machines. This NMOS process would also produce logic devices such as
a keyboard/display/printer controller for the HP 9825, a tape
controller chip for the HP 9845, and a small logic-oriented processor
dubbed the "nanoprocessor" that would be used as a floppy-disk
controller in the HP 9885M and as a controller in the HP 98034A HPIB
interface card for the new desktop machines.
Also to be replaced was the digital version of the Philips
tape-cassette drive used in the second-generation HP 9830 and later
in the HP 9821. Like the magnetic-card reader that preceded it, the
cassette-tape drive was too slow and lacked sufficient storage
capacity for the third generation. The new machines needed something
bigger, better, faster. Development of a replacement storage
peripheral would turn out to be a much bigger task than planned.
Programming languages also had to evolve for the new generation. With
more ROM capacity available, the software teams at the Loveland
Calculator Division started to develop language extensions to provide
desktop computer users with more capabilities to take on even tougher
tasks.
Many other new technologies were also needed for HP's
third-generation desktop machines: new displays, new printing
technology, bigger power supplies, and an entirely new I/O structure
that could support higher data rates. To develop all of these new
technologies and more, the Loveland Calculator Division's R&D
engineering team grew substantially. By 1975, it had passed 100
people.
It's not possible for me to tell all of their stories, but I'll do
the best that I can to recall those exciting days.
HP 9825A Assembly Line02
HP 9825A assembly line.
Photo courtesy of Fred Wenninger
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