Talk:HP 9800 series

"Compared with modern PCs which practically require a 4 year computer science degree to program C++ with Visual Studio and GDI, these were designed to be simple enough for a mere rocket scientist to use"

Woah! Someone has a wee little chip on his shoulder... AdorableRuffian 01:25, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

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BetacommandBot 01:38, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

Hardware details
The HP 2100 claims "The HP 9810, 9820 and 9830 desktop computers used a slow, serialized TTL version of the 2116 CPU". So does the 9800 series count as serial computers? --68.0.124.33 (talk) 02:28, 26 April 2008 (UTC)


 * No. What it means is that the input/output of the CPU chip was converted to a serial stream in order to reduce the package pin count.  Internal operations were performed in parallel fashion, just like in other CPU chips.  Reducing package pin count meant a smaller, cheaper integrated circuit package.&mdash;QuicksilverT @ 20:21, 28 December 2010 (UTC)
 * It is usual for calculators to do four bit arithmetic, often BCD. Compared to a 16 bit CPU, this might be called serial, but as above, I believe not bit serial. Gah4 (talk) 02:41, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
 * It is usual for calculators to do four bit arithmetic, often BCD. Compared to a 16 bit CPU, this might be called serial, but as above, I believe not bit serial. Gah4 (talk) 02:41, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

Table for all these models
Probably a table would suit better to take account of all these models/features/dates of release/price...--Marco Ciaramella (talk) 16:42, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

68000 ?
''Also available for programming the HP 9800 series was a bootable development environment based on UCSD Pascal, but with a compiler which would generate fast, native Motorola 68000 object code, instead of the slower p-code typical of most UCSD Pascal implementations. This performance was very valuable for scientific and technical programming applications.''

The 68000 was introduced in 1979. Did the HP 9800 series, which was mostly discontinued by 1979 really have a UCSD Pascal compiler for the 68000? Maybe this is confusion with the quite different HP 9000 series, which was 68000-based? Manassehkatz (talk) 01:17, 12 August 2016 (UTC)


 * I've removed it as it's odd on every level. UCSD Pascal didn't come out until '77, the entire point to it was the p-System, and as you write above, the 68000 is an entirely different CPU. I am surprised it's sat in this article for this long. I have a feeling the original editor meant to write something different, or confused CPUs, or something. I would guess the computer had a Pascal compiler at one point (Pascal's invention - not UCSD but Wirth's original language - predates these computers by two years), and maybe because of the period the editor thought it was UCSD Pascal? No idea, but if it actually was true someone created a 68000 cross compiler for the UCSD dialect, and made it run on the HP9800 series for some reason, then it does need sources. 2601:584:300:345E:C5B4:C86:D310:601F (talk) 03:51, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, that doesn't seem to belong here. I worked on these machines back in the late 70s, and the nomenclature is definitely confusing. There was a version of UCSD Pascal for the 68000-based machines made by the same division, which were originally called the HP 9826 and 9836 but were internally fundamentally different from the 9825/9835/9845; only the latter belong to the product series described here. The 9826/9836 were later rebranded "HP 9000 Series 200", and they are described on the HP_9000 page which seems fine. I guess some earlier author of this page thought that anything numbered HP 98xx must belong to this product line, but nope. Tgl42 23 June 2024 — Preceding undated comment added 03:10, 24 June 2024 (UTC)

Model 30
I recall some HP Model 30 computers had eight inch floppy disk drives; was it this series? Hugo999 (talk) 02:03, 13 May 2020 (UTC)