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Hey All,

I've always wondered if I should try to acquire one of the R/3*2 Instrument Controllers (332, 362, 382)

If anyone has one, would you be able to provide some feedback on how you use it and why you keep it? I've always liked the idea of having one in my rack and I've just started working with the hobbyist license for HT BASIC so I can get a handle on what using the original HP BASIC would be like but I'm just wondering if it is worth trying to acquire and piece together one of these seeing that the ones I can find today are all broken or missing things like keyboards etc or if I should just give it a pass and keep working on HT BASIC for Windows.

Would love to hear your thoughts.

TonyG

Hi Tony:

When I was working many decades ago the cost of any of the HP RMB controllers was very high.? Then Sun came out with a diskless node workstation.
HP responded with the 318 Diskless Unix Workstation and I ended up buying a number of them for use a RMB instrument controllers.? These cost way less.


--
Have Fun,

Brooke Clarke

axioms:
1. The extent to which you can fix or improve something will be limited by how well you understand how it works.
2. Everybody, with no exceptions, holds false beliefs.

Hello all,

Thanks everyone, very interesting the replies and I will put one of
these R/3*2 models on the wish list.

While researching these HP 9000 series I saw that some Logic Analyzers
from that era look pretty similar to the R/3*2.

For example the 16500A. These can be found much easier and cost much
less than a R/3*2 model.

I don't need the Logic Analyzer function and I can remove all boards to
save on power, just keep the motherboard and use it as a simple
workstation. It has the HP-HIL port for keyboard in the front and also
color display. Rack mount ears I guess are the standard ones as other HP
test equipment.

Would that be feasible to repurpose the 16500A ? Maybe it will need some
new EEPROM/EPROM to match some other Series 300 unit?

If someone has some photos with the 16500A motherboard maybe we can
identify if it matches other 300 series motherboard.

It's just an idea, not sure if this will work...

Regards,
Razvan

Hello Tony,

I just saw after pressing the Send button that I replied to your thread
instead of mine.

Way back when instrument control was the "Thing" in the instrumentation world. The HP controllers were focused on I/O control (Motorola based, PA RISC, etc.) (9825A, 9830A, 9845A, series 9000/200, 300, 500, 700, C110, C180, C270). PC based (Intel, etc.) generally did not handle I/O well, at least for instrument control.?

Hi Don,

Your statement that Motorola handled I/O well, but Intel
didn't, puzzles me.

Would you care to elaborate?

-Chuck Harris


On Fri, 3 May 2024 19:26:48 +0000 (UTC) "Don Bitters via groups.io"
<donbitters@...> wrote:

Way back when instrument control was the "Thing" in the
instrumentation world. The HP controllers were focused on I/O control
(Motorola based, PA RISC, etc.) (9825A, 9830A, 9845A, series
9000/200, 300, 500, 700, C110, C180, C270). PC based (Intel, etc.)
generally did not handle I/O well, at least for instrument control.
HP Basic was a great tool and generally established the market for
instrumentation control, especially when they gave it to the
marketplace.It evolved and then HP was splitting itself into Agilent
(instruments) and become a computer company (ies) and HP ported HP
Basic to HP-UX, then a little later dropped support for HP Basic.?HT
Basic created/ported HP Basic to the Intel platform and the rest is
history.Don Bitters

Yahoo Mail: Search, Organize, Conquer

What I seem to recall mainly involved the handshaking between the controller and instruments. The Motorola CPU’s, PA-RISC CPU’s architecture did the I/O and handshaking very well. Another issue was multitasking. The Intel CPU’s (at that time) did not seem to do the I/O and handshaking nearly as well, and did not seem to multitask. The programs we tried to run on Intel CPU’s back in the 80’s would sporadically lock up, report timing issues, garble data. The HP 9000/300, 9000/700 series ran our software seamlessly. While working at HP on an on-site cal team we ran between 12 to 16 calibration procedures (via separate windows for each cal procedure) simultaneously on a 9000 system comprised of 1 ea. /750 server and 3 ea. /382’s workstations each with 4 GPIB busses, we could also add an additional 9000/382 if it was needed for the particular job/campaign. The control system was not slow and never bogged down. I do know that the older C110 workstations are still in use as the older HPUX/Basic calibration software has not been ported over to PC based workstations as yet.

Don Bitters

Hi Don,

Thanks! I think I now see what you were comparing.

You were racing 680x0 based workstations and mainframes,
running unix, against PC's running DOS, and I was
thinking embedded systems running on bare metal.

In the workstation and PC world, how reliably a user's
software runs is mostly an operating system issue.

When Handshaking doesn't work properly, it is because
the OS isn't servicing the hardware quickly enough.

It took decades before microsoft figured out how to
write a viable multitasking OS.

It wasn't the hardware, per se, as Tanenbaum's Minix was
a real multitasking OS that ran quite nicely on the
original IBM PC ... an 8088 based machine with floppy
disks.

-Chuck Harris

On Tue, 7 May 2024 22:57:12 -0500 "Don Bitters via groups.io"
<donbitters@...> wrote:

What I seem to recall mainly involved the handshaking between the
controller and instruments. The Motorola CPU’s, PA-RISC CPU’s
architecture did the I/O and handshaking very well. Another issue
was multitasking. The Intel CPU’s (at that time) did not seem to do
the I/O and handshaking nearly as well, and did not seem to
multitask. The programs we tried to run on Intel CPU’s back in the
80’s would sporadically lock up, report timing issues, garble data.
The HP 9000/300, 9000/700 series ran our software seamlessly. While
working at HP on an on-site cal team we ran between 12 to 16
calibration procedures (via separate windows for each cal procedure)
simultaneously on a 9000 system comprised of 1 ea. /750 server and 3
ea. /382’s workstations each with 4 GPIB busses, we could also add an
additional 9000/382 if it was needed for the particular job/campaign.
The control system was not slow and never bogged down. I do know that
the older C110 workstations are still in use as the older HPUX/Basic
calibration software has not been ported over to PC based
workstations as yet.

Don Bitters