Have you ever seen heatsinks slide into rails? Oh, engineering students take notes. Wow. Look at the module. they've built a cube in there.

Hi, it's vintage computer time again. I got this one from the bunker, dusted it off, and we've got an absolute classic from 1979 here. This is the Hp. none of that Agilent or Keysight rubbish.

Hp 98 45 B What is it? It's not a personal computer because this is a like, a proper professional, engineering, industrial type computer. You couldn't really afford this at home because this had a starting price point of 14 000 us dollars. and that's 1979. So yeah, what's that in today's money? Don't even want to think about it.

but this was a professional workstation. I guess you could, uh, call it. And this one comes from Hp's Classic 9800 line of calculators that they had previously and it stems from the like. The 1998-30 was like the previous best calculator that they had before they went uh to this the 9845.

The 9830 series calculator slash computer was, uh, you know, a huge hit at the time, but they wanted to move into like the actual you know, a proper computer instead of like a you know, single or multi-line sort of like calculated display. They wanted a full Crt computer display system. so they developed the 9845, which there was an A version before this one and that came out in 1977 and that was a big hit. Once again, very expensive at the time and this one came out two years later, the B version and there was eventually a C version as well.

After that, before it pretty much by like the mid 90s. This was pretty much like gone the way of the dodo, But in the late 70s and early 80s this bad boy was the duck's guts because you've got to remember 1979. What else was around then? Well, the Ti 99 4a came out. You had like the Apple Ii, none of that Apple 2e rubbish.

The original Apple Uh 2. You had the Tandy Trs-80 model 2 for example, which I also have down in the bunker. Thumbs up! comments down below if you want to see a teardown of that one so that's real in crusty condition. But anyway, I've got one.

And you have the Atari 800 and other types of personal computers back then, but they were sort of like low end. they only worked at a couple of megahertz. Everything you know. this was limited.

whereas these graphics workstations so to speak, um, had a big it came with a big Crt on top of it. Sadly, I don't have it that plugs on the top. That's what these two mounts here are for and you can display up to 560 by 455 graphics. and that was like state of the art of the time monochrome, none of that color rubbish.

But like, the graphics on this sort of thing were so good and so easy to use. Rumor has it that George Lucas actually loved the 98 45 computer and the graphics, and he actually used one of these bad boys uh to help design some of the scenes for Empire Strikes Back. Unfortunately though, the B model like this only lasted like two years before they introduced the C model and the C coincidentally was the color model R and it was incredibly advanced for its day. and that's what they used to capture the graphics and generate and capture the graphics for Uh, War Games, those famous War Room uh, you know, computer large graphic screens.

They were all generated with the 9845c model with a camera capturing, uh, the monitor, the actual Rcrt display, and it was all finely tuned. and it was like incredibly advanced. uh, state-of-the-art color graphics for its time. So that was announced in 1980, came out in 1981, so that was still one of the state-of-the-art ways to generate color graphics for like computer type color graphics for that they wanted.

Uh for a movie like War Games, so very impressive stuff. You know this was a powerful beast and this was a 16-bit computer in the times of you know, just little 8-bit like Z80 and 65.02 processors and not only single cpu. this is actually dual cpu. They actually had one Uh dedicated to like the peripherals and Io which we'll see on the back and one dedicated.

They call it like a language uh processor dedicated to executing the basic language system because pretty much this was a basic computer. although it uses Hp's Extended basically which is pretty powerful in terms of uh, you know, doing graphics and plotting, and all sorts of you know, fancy data stuff and things like that. so you know it was much more advanced, uh, basic than a lot of the personal computers of the day. And memory.

This thing either had 16k or 32k just dedicated to video memory. So yeah, none of that sharing the memory rubbish. Wish you may memory which uh, started from a 64k and went up to like one and a half meg in this B model. So you know, 1979 to get like one and a half meg.

That was a massive amount of memory and you could hook uh, external, uh, disk drives and hard drives up to it as well. But jeez, if this thing was fourteen thousand dollars. Imagine what the hard drives and external disk drives cost. It's got dual tape storage as well.

217 kilobytes per tape. None of that standard cassette. rubbish. These were like Hp's tapes.

I'm not sure, uh, what other systems they were compatible with with. Yeah, dual tape so you can make backup copies and everything else. external storage solutions. As I said, and internally, one and a half meg of memory and the Crt that sat on top was actually powered from the units.

One of the amazing things about this, as we'll see on the back and as we tear it down, there were basically no cables for this thing. It was power cable in and that was it. Everything was actually powered through the top, The monitor and the graphics were actually powered through the top here. One of the interesting things about this was not only that it was that all powered through here, but the actual graphics uh, processing subsystem was inside the monitor as well.

So this actually has no I O connections on it. It's got no monitor outputs. It's got no serial outputs. It's got absolutely nothing.

There are no ports on this, but as you'll see on the back, there's like expansion slots that hooked in directly into the bus inside this thing. So it had dual 16-bit processors, which ran at a nominal 11 megahertz. So this was like a real powerful beast for 1979 early 1980 technology. It was absolutely amazing, but as I said, it actually ran basic for almost everything.

In fact, the user really didn't have any other option but to use the built-in basic. Now, there's no such thing as assembly language for this thing. They actually called them binary programs and really the only one who could write binary programs for this thing were Hp and a couple of other major uh software developers I believe. So I don't think.

correct me if I'm wrong down below. but the user had no way of actually writing. you know machine language for this thing. You had to do everything through basic, but you could load binary programs from the tape and they would execute faster and they'd execute in Cpu micro code as well.

Winner! And you can see it had a built in thermal printer as well that might have been optional as was the second cassette I believe. for everyone. Like the base model, geez, you paid 14 grand. I think you only got a single cassette, but they had really excellent capability to like dump like the screen and graphics and plotting capability.

you're going to get external uh plotting interfaces and Hp of course were big in the plotting market. so you can hook this up to huge industrial plotters for doing you know, huge like you know, schematics and other engineering Cad drawings and things like that. Really remarkable for the day. So yeah, this would have been a huge expense for any company, but this would have been like state-of-the-art engineering workstation computer.

I guess you could call it for engineering scientific laboratory use all that, sort of you know, research use and things like that. It also came in a Tempest model which is a like electromagnetic shielded one for the government and the military. So yeah, I guess that was popular. Wonder how much that one cost? So as you can see, it's rather large and uh, deep and rather heavy.

So let's have a look and do a tear down on this bad boy in 4k resolution. Oh winner! And here it is, isn't it beautiful? It looks like, yeah, like a modern computer should look like it. Well, at least in 1979 1980. Anyway, I mean, it's just, and you know, it's just beautifully styled, enormous beast, Hugely long.

There's the length of my arm for, uh, reference there. It is a big heavy beast. And if you want all the details on this, check out the website Hp9845.net It's got absolutely everything you could possibly want on this. Ah, including all of the people who worked on this, and uh, generally.

they're not quite sure who headed the B series. uh, project. but generally. uh.

Jack Walden and Bill Eads is, uh, the two that managed the A project and worked on the C as well. So they probably manage the B project. But uh, yeah, there's a whole bunch of they've got. You know a good lot of the names of the people who worked on the firmware, the hardware, and the casing.

This actual the style of the case in the industrial wire Designer was done by Uh. Leroy Lacelle. So yeah, it's a really good job. I mean, this looks like a professional bitter kit.

First of all, I got our printer up here. Obviously there was some sort of like a roll, uh, thing that went in there that held the paper, which I obviously I don't have. There's just a little, uh, slip of paper left inside this thing. Then you've got some paper advance and top of form buttons and then you've got the, uh, the two, uh, cassette mechanisms.

These are rather interesting design in that you might think, well, how do I eject? How do I get it open? Do I? Oh, there it is. You just press that and you slide your cartridge in there like that. It is rather nice and then the eject will actually then physically eject it back out. That's a rather clever design.

I really like that. and then if we, uh, go down we can have a look. Now if we check out the keyboard here, you can see it. really.

Uh, it hasn't really stood the test of time. Tried to clean it up a bit, but it's obviously got like lots of I don't know if that's eventually going to cut, that sort of darker color is eventually going to come out of it or not. But yeah, it didn't clean up that well. so unfortunately I don't know if you got any ideas about how to fix it up.

Yeah, I know about retrobrite and all that sort of stuff. It's not. I don't think it's yellowed. Um, I don't know if these keys have gone extra yellow.

I don't think so. I think it's a looks, you know, a fairly original color. It's just that. Yeah, it's got some stains and stuff on it, but anyway, it's got like typing functions, tab set, tab, clear, brilliant.

It's got edit system functions so step record, delete, sha, insert line, and all that sort of stuff. auto St. I guess auto step or something. That button oh did come up.

Oh, it's a little bit stuck. Then you've got all your display stuff. You can actually clear the display. Uh, you know.

then you've got cursor keys and roll keys as well. Then you've got 16 function keys over here which also have some secondary functions as well. And on the C model, these doubled as like color buttons and stuff like that invert video that's interesting, blinking cursor, underlying cursor. I guess you can change between those.

Then your main qwerty keyboard here is pretty traditional and then you've got you know, stop run for your programs. because this was all got to remember. This was all basic program oriented and like from all reports, this thing is like just very nice to use. and that's why everyone loved it.

was just simplistic design. It was designed for a single person purpose, which was to run, you know, Hp Extended Basic Uh programs extremely well and extremely fast. So much so that the basic commands were actually micro codes inside the custom cpu inside this thing. So yeah, it did.

Actually, you know, execute pretty quickly. It wasn't just your generic processor running a basic interpreter, it's you know. they actually optimized this whole system for running the basic programs. And that's just a beautiful numeric keypad.

I love that it's got an execute button. I love that. Brilliant. So yes.

stop, reset, run, pause, continue for your programs. It was all just oriented around that like you didn't do anything else on it. There was no, you know, word processing. As far as I know, I don't don't know if you could even run.

Was there a spreadsheet program for this thing? I don't know. Anyway, I think that's absolutely beautiful. Let's swing it around. and the backside of this.

As I said, there are no traditional I O connectors on this thing at all. There's a power in which you could switch between 110 and uh, 220. made in the Usa, Usa. Two gigantic fans on it, the thermal wire design we'll have a look at when we open.

I'm not sure where the probably sucks air in from the bottom because there's no side vents that I can see. and the rest of it is just like these expansion headers down here. We've got four expansion headers, which, as I said, are designed to plug in. These cartridges Basically think of them as like, you know, like Pc plug-in boards.

You know, your Isa uh, plug-in boards essentially. Or your bloody whatever you've got these days, are the newfangled Micro Channel rubbish, or your Pci Express ports for you kitties, But basically, um, yeah, you're plugging these expansion cards and they would have, you know, Rs-232 serial interfaces that have plotter interfaces, printer interfaces, uh, external mesh storage interfaces, a real-time clock. Because this didn't have a real-time clock in it, you had to plug in an external one. It's like, yeah, you just plugged them in there And you could get an expansion cage which had an additional uh, seven slots as well.

There you go. This is probably the only computer you'll ever see without any connectors on the back at all. Not even another one. Aha, there we go.

That's where it sucks the air in from the bottom. the case curves down here. I've got some standoffs here and it sucks in the air from the bottom. and uh, they're not normally open like that.

Normally I wouldn't be able to poke the boards in there, but uh yeah, the foam has just completely disintegrated. Obviously they had a filter on there and oh yeah, yep. Yep. there we go.

Yeah, what's left of the foam is just. yep. it's just disintegrated with time. Yeah yeah, there it is there.

Yucca. So this was designed by engineers for engineers so I expect this to be a Bobby Desla inside. Let's crack it open for those playing along at home. There you go: Ship the 13th of the 12th 1917 Terminal I O 4003.

I don't know what that means. Ah, almost forgot to show you the interface for the Monday. here. There's two of these as you can see.

big cart edge connector along here, a big robust, uh you know, metal clippy thing and there's that for like Emi or something like that. But yeah, it's big and robust. And uh, the monitors designed to connect into here. So this is power, uh, you know, and bus and everything else.

Because as I said, these aren't video signals traveling across here because there is no video circuitry inside this thing. Uh, the video circuitry to generate all the signals is inside the monitor. So yeah, we're not going to find a graphics card. All right, let's see if we can lift this bad boy off.

Oh yeah, yeah, that just comes off. Oh, look at that. Ah, beautiful. There's not much dust in it either.

Oh, look at this. there's a handle. Trained service personnel only. Oh beautiful.

If you have a look inside the case, you can see the metal wire braiding around there for Emi. Stuff like that, Is it got? I don't know. Is that what is that that feels really rough? That coating I don't know. Is that some sort of like silver nickel screening or something That wouldn't That wouldn't surprise me at all.

I wonder if that's conductive? Let's try that. Yep, yeah. called that one dead short. Absolutely no surprises for finding.

uh, you know, removable board construction like this. Color coded so you know we've probably got uh, you know, we're gonna have a mix of memory and uh, Cpu and other uh cards and it looks like we're not fully populated either. So this thing is obviously not fully expanded. And of course.

yep. Test points: Beautiful. 12 volt Logic ground plus 5 Minus 12 Plus 18. That's unusual.

Plus minus 18 actually 175 volts Dc Max. Uh, that's interesting. Why you've got 175? Is that for the monitor? Perhaps. Anyway, there it is.

over there again. Why do they need that? Yeah, it's got to be for the monitor and everything is modular. Look at this. Even the back plane on the back comes out and that's just a modular card like that that is beautiful.

Made in the Usa. Rev: E Oh fantastic. Semford Ls, Uh, three, six sevens and oh, look at that and that'd be a hand tape jobby too. That's just beautiful that connects down to the bottom but motherboard.

and then the expansion connectors. Like I don't even have to like. Just like I think even this back panel assembly is a modular design. Looks like it just comes out.

the fan assembly and the back of this. Ah, fantastic. So I unscrewed this little uh bracket here that came off. but I still can't get these cards out without actually lifting off the keyboard and looks like it's hinged.

So can I? Well, is there a no, no, Oh, look at that. Look at that. Oh, it's not actually hinged, but it comes out. And the great thing about this is that you can access everything Beautiful.

so you can still access everything and power this thing on. And of course, as I said, designed by engineers for engineers basically. and uh, yeah, they would have had their own extender cards and stuff like that. So if you wanted to probe a board while it's you know this one here, for example, then you could lift it out, put in your extender card, lift it up, and the board would be up here like this.

Then you'd be able to probe it. while the whole thing's operational and looks like all this stuff over here you can like, you can access and probe all that. We've got access to our tape mechanisms. Ah, beautiful.

And here's one of our processor modules. Because as I said, there is two. There's one called the Ppu or the Uh peripheral processor unit that handles all of your Io and your uh, Crt interface and all that uh, sort of stuff. And then there's another Cpu, which is called the Lpu, which is a logical processor unit, which, uh, you know, as the name says it.

actually it processes all your basic programs, contains all the micro code, uh to run all your basic programs. It's just see, it's effectively your Cpu and you can see we've just got a standard 7, 4, uh series logic. There's that source M4, M4ls stuff, none of that high powered stuff, none that F series rubbish. And apparently they were actually the same unit.

Um, but basically they just had different functions, so I'm not sure what the deal is there. I guess they want to reuse their custom silicon which is under this heatsink here. so all the rest of us, just, you know, pretty much uh, Jelly Bean 74 Ls series glue logic. Let's have a look on the bottom.

Oh, might need that bracket and uh yeah, no, there's no bodge wires or anything like that. It is a four layer jobby. At least you wouldn't need any more than that. But yeah, the old, uh, the square traces, all the electrons are just going to fly off the corner.

It's terrible. No, no, the trace is at an angle. Odd angle like that. Oh no, no.

But anyway, here's where all the magic happens. This is the Uh hybrid module down here which actually contains three chips. It's in a metal can package like this and I don't think I think if we take the heatsink off, I think we still can't see inside. I think you've gotta like, yeah, uh, butcher it to see inside.

Anyway, I should be able to include a photo here that has that so we'll like check that out. But uh. anyway. so um, yeah, Made in the Usa contains three chips.

One is the Bpu or binary uh, processing chip and it's as its name suggests, it actually does the actual processing and all that sort of jazz. It's the Cpu and then you've got the Emc which is the extended maths chip and that does our floating point calculations. So yeah, this thing contained a floating point coprocessor basically. And then there's the Ioc, which you can guess that one, that's the Ior controller type stuff, handles all the interfacing and interrupts and all sorts of other paraphernalia.

But yeah, it's basically three chips inside. That bad boy. Well, there you go. No one was going to be happy were they unless I took that apart.

and um, well. there it is. Yeah, it's a ceramic hybrid. Looks like it's yeah.

I think it's bonded on there. and of course we're not gonna get and we're not gonna pry that can off. So yeah, not even gonna try anyway. Yeah, up this.

it's a ceramic height, interesting construction, a ceramic hybrid like this. And then they've got like zebra strips around here. They've got like a sheet which just goes in there like that. And there you go, there's your gold plated.

Thank you very much. That'd be real heavy quality gold plating. None of that, you know thin crap they put on these days and that just works like a zebra strip to. uh, the contact matching contacts on the board isn't that neat.

I wonder how they came to that uh, design decision? Well, I guess because they had like a three chip solution. Why? Why you wouldn't? Just maybe the manufacturing technology at the time just wasn't there to uh to put that on? Uh, fiberglass? Those you know, bond those chips and then bond them. You know why I bond them over onto fiberglass Pcb. Maybe at the saw? I don't know what the size and complexity they were was.

Fiberglass Pcb? Die. but like direct bonding a thing back in. you know? Well, this was released in 70. end of 79.

so you know and then basic what comes from previous designs as well. So yeah, it's like it probably started work on this in like the mid 70s. So yeah, I can see why they did that back when you rolled your own stuff though. Ah, thing of beauty Joy Forever.

Now hang on just a minute. What is going on here? All of the blue ceramic capacitors on this board have what looks like are they ferrite beads? Are they little ferrite beads? Or are they just spacers? Um, I I don't know. I think they're ferrite beads. Every single capacitor on the board.

ah, has anyone ever seen that before? Anyway, clearly we have our Ppu or Lpu board here and then obviously and that's either the Ppu or the Lpu. a memory board. I'm not sure which it doesn't actually tell you, doesn't know. You'd have to look up the part numbers and whatnot.

Anyway, anyone? uh, they're 41.60 So does anyone want to calculate how much rams in this thing? Anyway, you could get, um, 512k boards for this thing. And yeah, as I said, you could put three of those in here to expand it to 1.5 meg. Unbelievable. And the other board here, which contains ram.

This actually contains four double, one, six chips and they're 16k times one. So there's uh, like two rows of 16 there. So it's 16k, 32k and that's 64k total. That's more than the maximum 32k video memory inside this thing.

So I've got to say that this one here is this one only has 64k of cpu memory unless we've got more on the other side of the unit on a separate board. I think this is a minimum configuration of 64 K and uh, these Mos Tech jobbies. They look like the Roms up the top are they? Curiously, they seem to have different part numbers. There's 36151s, there's 36 171s.

not sure what the deal is there. Oh, seven O's what. and this is hilarious. Look how they routed this up and around instead of through.

It's hilarious. Come on. Look, they're able to go through here. although you'll notice that the solder mask.

ah, I can see some solder mask exposed in there. So yeah, yeah, that was. that was really fine pitch for the day. I didn't get these for two bucks from China.

So to answer the question, going back to here, they've used uh, upd, uh, four, one, six Ds and once again, these are 16k times one dram. So 16 there's 32 in each row that's 64k and double that is 128k. So obviously this is not the video memory either. This looks like, um, the processor memory or extra processor memory.

And as you can see, these slots are all color coded. red and blue. Like this indicates that. Well, red and blue.

that's your memory expansion card so that bad boy can go in there. And we could have put up to three extra memory boards in there. So I don't know. Maybe that one and this is, uh, gray here.

And so maybe that one is um, cpu rom and uh, video memory as well. Or is that video rom? Nah. Anyway, the other board we've got down in there that just, uh, extends up to here and that goes up to the Uh Crt. So that's obviously like the Crt interface.

It's all just 7-4 glue logic. Hey, what is this down here? There's almost as if this slides I out there you go. This drawer is only for roms having black labels. Okay, uh.

it's a oh great graphics, right? It's a rom cartridge thing. There you go. Graphics: You can plug in little graphics modules. Isn't that cool? Geez, there's not much room on there.

Oh look, there's another that same ceramic hybrid thing. Look at that. Wow. Now I've heard that the C model is quite similar to the B.

It's just really, the graphics are different. Does that mean that they've added like other graphics rom stuff in there? That's wow. That's fascinating. You can say you see the contacts on there? they're only single-sided like that, and then the contacts are on one side like this, so you like.

I don't know if you can plug it into any slot, but presumably you can. Isn't that absolutely fantastic? And then that just buggers off over to here. Ah, that hasn't got. Oh no, it's got double-sided There you go.

Wow. Um, here you go. Option roms. So there you go.

You could like expand the graphics capability and presumably other functions I don't know if you could actually get. Maybe you could get programs to plug into roms? I mean, there's a lot of them. That's that's fantastic. I love that design.

Wow, that is brilliant. And yeah. here you go. Here's the other Lpu.

Or and here you go. Here's the other process aboard, the Lpu or the Ppu. I still haven't bothered to match up the Uh part numbers. Uh, here.

the processor is on the other side. and yes, it is absolutely identical. Fire50613 made in the United States of America. Presumably that's the Uh test date, a seven year manufacturer intestate 79 year, 40th week, and number 87.

maybe? Actually, I'm pretty sure given the location of this and next to the next memory board, this is that was the Uh Ppu or the peripheral uh program unit because that handles the graphics interface. and obviously we've only got half the amount of memory 16k, 32k And I know that that's the amount of maximum video memory in this thing. And that's probably the graphics rom right there. And this is your printer control logic card and that is right next to Tada.

There it is, and and I find it quite offensive that this one goes in this direction and the Cpu and other boards go in that direction. So yeah, I don't know how they could live with themselves designing that. Um, anyway, there you go. That's uh, just the printer interface.

uh board. And it's and I guess that needs a fair bit of like, um, power. So it's got its own little connection interface like that and you can see the cables from that buggering off there. But also, um, this goes up once again to the Crt up here.

That board actually extends all the way up there. so that's interesting that I go through the printer control card like that. I guess I from a physical layout. Oh no.

Look. check out the traces. Hang on. Now you can see the traces.

Look, they're all bunched around and bypassing and going straight up there. So yeah, they just they're just using physically the printer interface board. I guess the printer only needs a couple, of, you know, not much, uh, interfacing at all. And um, no, it could be a serial joby and the rest of us.

Yeah, just dedicated going up to the Uh Crt. Neat. For the crystal socket aficionados, and for the ceramic package aficionados, look at that. somebody's written yet.

Minus 5.0 volts. Now that 5 volts. Rubbish. 5.0 Thank you very much.

Now, I know people want to take a look at the power supply in this thing, so let's see if I can get it out. Now I'm pretty sure that you don't take out these screws here because like these, these big big R screws here. Uh-huh C17 that doesn't have a designator, but they're They're obviously two big ass caps. They're going right down the center, so they're probably like the full height of the damn thing or something.

I don't know. Well, not quite, because there's a motherboard on the bottom, isn't there? Um, and I don't think you undo these. uh, screw bolts here. Uh, T2 T2, that's not Annie, that's um, yeah, that's holding in the transformer probably.

and these are bolting in something else I don't like. like big ass crimp interface or something. I don't know. So I think it levers out because there's another motherboard connection here.

so I'm gonna like. And there's some heatsink fin in here, so let me let me gently. Oh yeah, that's giving. Yep, Yep, yep, pop pop Pop goes the weasel.

So yeah, I was clearly supposed to uh, pull this entire assembly out with this handle. and I like. I did actually try that, but I could not budget. hence why I took off.

Uh, the four threaded insert. Uh, screws down in here. so maybe either. you know it's just age probably can we? Oh yeah, yeah.

there we go. No wackers. I know, uh, people are probably cringing at the moment, but uh-huh. that's supposed to does that come out? Yes, it's all discharged and everything hasn't been powered up forever.

So oh hello. Yep, Oh no. Look at that. Look at that.

Oh hats off. Wow. Look at the module. They've built a cube in there.

They've built a cube with the power supply. Look at the big ass power supply caps in this thing. Absolutely enormous. They go right down the center like that.

Yeah, there's motherboard runs under the bottom, but they've got like a protective um cover over the bottom of that motherboard. And then we've got yeah, power supply board on the back here, which then has a card edge connector. which goes up to here like this, got more card edge connectors, Cart edge connectors galore on the power supply. Ah, it's a thing of beauty.

It's a joy forever. Um, and then they've got another board over here. I don't know what that one's doing, which then goes into the side rails on this board and um, then okay, we're going to fly back over here that generates probably the high voltage. Um, right.

Oh not another. Yep, another transformer over there. And the interesting thing is, from a thermal point of view, like a lot of the airflow. Like you know, three quarters of it goes over the Cpu cards like this.

but the other parts of it goes through these heatsink fins. which ta-da I can. oh I can lift it out. Look at that.

There you go, there's our power supply board. Ah and I love the find arrangement. Look at that. that is beautiful.

Got an early Silp head still pads. Uh well. the trademark still pad wasn't around then. 78 45th Week 78 Seventh Week 79 here.

But yeah, there's our our power supply. Isn't that beautiful? Oh oh, Reefer Reefer Madness. Oh Damn. Oh yeah.

Oh yeah. there you go. You want to replace that bad boy? Yeah, if you wanted to get this back up and running, you would. Uh, recap this entire thing.

Sprague for all you sprag fanboys? There you go. Fantastic. Look at that. Hp.

Someone at the Hp factory wound that so holding the tongue at the right angle and the card edge connectors in there. Oh come on, this is fantastic. Holes for trimmer pots? Um no no I don't know what those holes are doing. Actually, I don't know, that's a mystery.

but oh come on. Seriously, this is just absolutely fantastic. Have you ever seen any the heat sinks slide into rails? Have you ever seen heat sinks slide into rails? Oh how can you not think this is the best thing ever? Ah, Engineering students take notes. Please look at look look look what does that do? No idea what that does.

Ah, can they label it? Um anyway. like uh yeah, it's okay. Linear reg. Oh okay, that's actually that goes up.

That only goes up to the top power supply board. So there you go, just generating some extra rails there, and then that goes into these boards. There you go. Look at that big ass bridge rectifier.

Big Ass. Oh yeah, the heatsink. That heatsink is just for that bridge rectifier. Oh what a beast.

Oh but come on, this is. this is just beautiful. Look at those wiring looms down there as well. Oh come on.

And as I said, the damn heat sinks have rails. Seriously, how good is this? And there's the other one that plugs into the top, uh, power supply board and down into the motherboard as well as did, uh, this one down here that plugs into the motherboard. You can see that and like, come on, that's brilliant. Lm320s Um, sorry Ln 320 at the top.

Uh, 2n638 13th Week 79 down there. another custom Hp coil. Ah, come on September 1979. Look at that like this is just absolutely fantastic.

So they've split a whole bunch of the functionality across multiple boards and as I said, they put the railings down in there. so you put the heatsink. So this is like these are basically right angle railings. so the board, once it goes in there, it can't really come out like you have to put it in like that and you can't.

You can't wiggle wiggle. Yeah, that out of there. it goes straight down and lines up with the socket at the bottom. Unbelievably good.

And even look at this. This connector interface here goes to the top of your power supply board like that. Well, it's like out of here over there and then that goes through your wiring harness over to these, uh, turrets over here, aren't They beautifully are prepped and wrapped and soldered. That's beautiful.

Oh, and they go into that's the printer interface that we, uh, saw before. So they're penetrators which go through the plastic. They go through the middle. Um, via these, uh, plastic things here.

and that's how they get the power into the printer in a face. Is there an easier way to do this? Yes, there is. But it. it's not as beautiful.

So please leave it in the comments down below. Have you seen a better like, modular engineered product than this? Like I? I don't think I've torn down one that's as good as this. Um, it's just. it's so impressive.

Unbelievable. It's not a real capacitor unless you can grip it like that. Look at that. Ah, Spring Jobby.

Ah. 17th week 79. Good vintage. Oh, and those connections over there that I thought might have been big, like spade lugs or something like that.

Nah. Turns out that they're actually, uh, looks like stud diodes on a heatsink. Jeez, it's almost an anti-climax to look at. The rest of it, isn't it? After that pornography? Um, Anyway, there's our tape drive mechanism.

I'm not going to like take that apart until I can. When you open the flap, you can see like a head in there. So obviously this is like the head amplifier. I'll give you a closer up view for those playing a lot at home if you're interested.

Um, and yeah. yeah. So and that's got some motor drive as well, and they really want you to know it's made in the Usa by Uncle Sam himself. And then that goes over to the obvious, uh, tape driver, controller board, and uh, another.

That'd be no doubt another ceramic hybrid job. I don't even think I'm going to bother to take this board out and get to the bottom board under there. It's just like a motherboard interface, which, uh, you know, you can see the traces running under there. Right across.

Looks like it's just a motherboard interface which then connects to the keyboard underneath that. But anyway, so there's two of those. So yeah, they certainly wouldn't Uh, you know, it cost a bit to, uh, populate that uh, tape drive. It's obviously identical, so that's why you know the base model only came with one drive.

Geez, two tape drives? It's an extra couple of thousand dollars, please, sir. But anyway, we've got this board in the middle, which seems to be some uh interface jobby for like the tape and the keyboard and everything else. So that just goes down to the motherboard down the bottom. here somewhere.

and yeah, look, I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna take it all apart. It's not that I don't think there's anything really extra to see under there, and we've already spent enough time gushing over the rest of this and the printer mechanism. I don't know, there's not much to once again like.

I'm not going to take out the whole thing and go to town on that for those who want to see the labels and what not down in there. but look, there's a big heatsink underneath the, uh, bottom of that thing. Certainly. So once again, you know all the there'd be a bit of air flow over that.

not much, I think most of it. So oh yeah, as I said, like you know, uh, the air vents. um they come up and they come up from the bottom here. and as I said, it looks like you know, a little bit of it at least.

Uh, you know, maybe a quarter of it or something goes under the print and print mechanism and the power supplies and stuff like that right up to the back. But oh boy, that is brilliant. Is it not? Come on, Is that one of the coolest tear downs I've done? Come on, you got to give it. Give it up for the Hp engineers.

Seriously. here's okay. here's a list of uh, or like, at least the people we know about who worked on this puppy. Um, or at least worked on this series of machines.

So yeah, fantastic work. And this sucker expanded. barely fits on my bench anyway. Oh, that was absolutely brilliant.

So I hope you enjoyed that. Just a random bunker item that was gathering dust. And that's yeah. It turns out to be one of the best.

Like modular teardowns that we've done. Absolutely brilliant for like you know, late 1970s technology. and it only had, you know, a three, four year life span. Something like that, tops.

Before you know, other sort of your more workstationy type computers in the mid 80s sort of came in like late 80s and especially when they took off in the 90s. Just you know, left all this sort of stuff uh for dust. but yeah, custom Hp uh. processors running you know, their own custom, uh, basic.

and it was micro. The processors are micro code optimized for, you know, the basic routines and stuff like that. It's just absolutely phenomenal. And as I said, apparently everyone who used this thing just raved over it.

So you know it's ease of use and usability. It's just a well-engineered well-executed spare. No expense. Uh, computer from the late 16-bit computer, custom designed everything from the late 1970s, early 80s.

and yeah, by the end of the 80s, like hands up, were you using this series of computers like into the 90s? Some people may have. You know, if if it were, you know, if it ain't busted, don't fix it. Heck I could. I was still when I left my job at Uh Sircell.

Um, I was still using like Windows 3.11 machines in production. So yeah, um, that was like, you know, 10 years after they retired or something crazy. But you know, still work so we still maintain them, still used them. And yep, hands up.

If you used one of these things, leave your thoughts and comments down below so I hope you liked it. If you did, please give it a big a thumbs up. As always, discuss down below. Catch you next time you.