One thing that definitely stands out compared to home computers of the era is that this machine was probably expensive to produce, but that's to be expected from H.P. of the time. This thing was also more portable than just about anything else made in 1980.

@Ducimatic

3 жыл бұрын

Of course, HP influenced the market. HP IB (HP interface bus) became GPIB (general purpose interface bus)

My dad was an electronics design engineer back in the early 80's and I remember him bringing one of these (or similar, can't remember now) home for me to play with. I'm sure dad would have loved to have watched your tear downs of old school electronics. Had hours of fun with one of these making it display basic graphs on the screen. The build quality is incredibly good, they really don't make them like this any more. Great video, a real trip down memory lane!

@mlkbob

4 жыл бұрын

Ha. Same here; my Dad used to bring one home for me to play with as well. There was a surprising number of games available for it that had been written by engineers for it and passed around. I remember him bring a cassette home with about 15 to 20 games or other "fun" programs on it.

True artist signs their work. This is a piece of industrial art and the signatures are from the artists that created it.

@realgroovy24

8 жыл бұрын

Don't get that on machines made today! My Commodore Amiga 500 for example has a few signatures too.

@realgroovy24

8 жыл бұрын

***** Apple never revolutionized anything, they brought a few cool ideas like the mouse, but I believe Commodore are true pioneers in the day, Jobs left apple sometime in the 80's or early 90's anyway.

@realgroovy24

8 жыл бұрын

***** Yay! Great to know that comment wasn't real! But when he came back in 1998 he did pretty much put an end to the typical beige box machine, but yeah he definitely doesn't deserve all the credit. He only made portable MP3 players popular, same goes with tablets.

@xDR1TeK

7 жыл бұрын

YES!!!

@Savupirtti

7 жыл бұрын

Interesting history piece is that Wozniak were working at the HP calculator division? somewhere in the time window that fits to the apple 1&2 creation.

CuriousMarc has more information on the HP85 if you're interested, including plenty of repairs.

That is the cleanest old machine i've ever seen. Immaculate!

6:49 12V 8W thank you very much.

@lululombard

8 жыл бұрын

The way it's written is very misleading.

@fatdude2468

8 жыл бұрын

Oh yes I'm a douchebag for making a valid comment & being sarcastic and using his phrase. You're the douchebag for even replying with a pointless comment.

You need to get your hands on an HP 9825. The CPU in that thing is a beast. 16 bit, 10 MHz, in 1976! It was built on a ceramic module, with multiple dies, and connected to the board by zebra strips! What's more... Zebra strips that WORK!!! Mine STILL works to this day! It also had hinged PC boards that could fold out while the machine was live!

@douro20

8 жыл бұрын

It was based on the architecture of the HP 2100 minicomputer. There was also the 9845c graphic workstation which was used for the colour graphics in the move 'War Games'.

I used HP85 computers in 1982 while working as a trainee for a geophysics survey company in the oil industry. We used it connected to seismic equipment and to the positioning systems to retrieve the data and log it with the current position. Price at the time was 3.500 USD Thanks for the memories!

@aaronbrandenburg2441

3 жыл бұрын

Unfortunately you missed a chance to say Yankee bucks! Assuming you're not in Australia! At least he didn't do this one like he did to his new electric car he took the Swift heart he didn't turn it on they locked the car he turned it on and he didn't take it apart. Was going to put a comment on there saying oh he's going to take it apart in the parking lot before he even gets in it but someone else beat me to the punch sort of oh well. Anyone else find a high-pitch voice very irritating I actually like his voice however my father has expressed this at least a few times I don't pay it any mind because to each is old but just curious if it's just him or if we would like that as well no harm done. I'm not saying it's a bad thing but I'm just curious what other people may think. You know sometimes, too like that :-) finger pointing to myself on that. Oh oh I know what does chips end just for 4in impact or whatever had done some damage to it let's get crackin. Speaking of cracked chips I know I'm not talkin about the potato chip you stepped on by accident and even bigger mess. Has anyone ever heard about those ssds solid-state drives that are like hyper secure that actually literally suck can self-destruct basically uses high voltage High current the poppy chip whatever time and then takes out the controller for the flash memory. As well as of course full encryption all that those can even be remotely killed as in bang bang bang go to chips buy a cellular link if I remember correctly if the battery on the laptop should die and other things as well I would like to see if someone could ever get a hold of one of those that see a video of it and action blowing the chips that would be just awesome I've seen the aftermath pictures but never a video of them actually doing the destruction process. You know who would I would not need that to destroy your data in some way chips are going bang right well he goes boom electroboom of course I'm pretty sure he'd find a way to destroy data even waited want to. By the way I did know some way to accidentally destroyed dad on Once for some reason they were swapping out an SD card in something remove some files they really really needed and a hamper in the kitchen it somewhere is wearing the garbage disposal and yes either or they're across the room or something but having a hard time getting the SD card out we did it popped out bounce off the corner of the room and wind up going into the running garbage disposal well they were pretty pissed fortunately by the way I did know some way to accidentally destroyed Anna wants for some reason they were swapping out at SD card in something to move some files they really really needed and a happy in the kitchen it's away from the garbage disposal and guess either or there are crossed the rumor something but having a hard time getting the SD card out we did it popped out Ballast off the corner of the room and one up going into the running garbage disposal well they were pretty pissed fortunately everything that time was just a copy of the data them was in the internal memory the only realize that after about billion megabytes of curse words later. Worthy oz of that happening at least in terms of dead destruction by accident that would have to be one in a million toilet water billion would be so I'm making a milkshake in the same thing happening just right when they opened it where is open for less than a second but yeah heard about that once but I think it was staged there's a video on some website play article was entitled dumb ways to destroy that people have destroyed data or something or a parent lost everything looks staged so take that with a grain of salt. Although probably the easiest way to destroy data on a hard drive to be a physical disc would be the usual those styles of drawing that's the glass platters and all you would need with a mechanism that would act like a spring loaded hammer in a drive housing that would put a sharp Point Stu all the platters on all sides LeBron 5 bye-bye data don't know if it would ensure enough shards to bring her every bit of it useless but it's an idea for cheap means of this. Croatian be using Google what I'm talkin about it be that somebody will get my idea LOL.

Love the teardowns of vintage stuff! Incredible condition on this one too.

What a beautifully curated, well-researched video. Thanks Dave!

Dave, thanks as always for giving respect to vintage computers! I've got an hour awesome geekery to look forward to when I get home tonight... Can't wait!

It took less than half a human lifetime to get from that, to computers that can render this video in minutes.

@Unordung

8 жыл бұрын

Nothing amazes more than this fact, or more importantly understanding this fact and pondering the future.

@frac

8 жыл бұрын

My current video card has, I'm not kidding, 2,000,000 times more memory than my first computer.

@Unordung

8 жыл бұрын

Yup My first computer was an 80286 with Dos playing Final lap and Police quest. Both had about 64kb of RAM or 64*10^3 bytes. Today my PC has 16Gb of Ram or 16*10^9 bytes. That happened in 25 years, imagine another 25 years the technology we will have.

@redtails

8 жыл бұрын

well you need computers to design better computers..

@JasperJanssen

8 жыл бұрын

+John Hartman the original IBM PC with the 8088 at 4.77MHz started at 16 kB, but needed 128 to do real work, and was expandable to 640. By the time the 80286 rolled around (IBM AT and clones) the standard memory size was pretty much 1024. Our first PC clone was a Sperry that had 128 on the motherboard, and was purchased with the 128kB extra memory option. That was a full length isa card that came with four rows of 18 memory chip spaces - one row with soldered on chips and the other three with sockets, for 128k per set of 18 chips you'd install. A slightly later model Sperry I once bought for parts at scrap prices had 256kB on the motherboard and included a 384kB expansion card, tiny little quarter length ISA thing.

Your tear downs are so much better Thankyou

OMG! I used to use one of these "back in the day". The company I worked for did marine engineering design and analysis services for cold regions (ice breakers and oil rigs working in the ice) and I used one of these as the front end to a number of our systems. I once waited for my luggage at the carousel of the airport and out it popped, outside of its box...all naked.. But it survived and fought many a battle afterwards. Thanks for the trip down memory lane. Cheers! ps The teardown is awesome. I never did look under the hood as it was super reliable and never gave me any trouble.

@glennasaurus81

6 жыл бұрын

Drink!!

@davidflack6430

3 жыл бұрын

Was using one until a few years ago.

Wow, it really looks like it was built yesterday

This is a gorgeous system, thanks.

I love your video style. Packed full of information....thanks for making watch worthy videos.

Just checked my subscriptions... only saw Vintage Computer Teardown... I need to watch this before all other videos. Love the old style PCs!

Serious nostalgia for me. I learned to program aged 7 on an HP85a. My dad was a chemical engineer and decided to buy one because it's what they used in the lab. It came with a fantastic set of manuals which taught you how to program in HP basic. My brother (about 9 at this point) and I used to get pocket money to translate old FORTRAN process models my dad wrote for some hideous mainframe into HP basic. It was such a fantastic computer - I remember taking it to our computer club and all my friends (who had ZX-81s with 1k of RAM) were astonished by the thermal printer, built-in tape and screen and most of all, collossal 32kB of ram (we had one of the expansion units in the back). Still yearn for that beautiful clicky keyboard with lovely smooth plastic keycaps. That was the start of a 30+ year career in programming (still going).

Classic device. My father had one of these at university to sort a list of student names, calculate the class average and sum the term scores for each student. Once the data was entered, it took the HP85 about 7 hours to complete the process for about 300 students. It took so long because it could not store all 300 records in RAM, so the sorting process had to be partially storage (tape) based. Excellent video, thanks!

Loved this teardown and is designed with the engineer in mind. Great vlog Dave 😁😁😁Kim😁😁😁

MOAR teardowns!!!!

@MisterMuffin_

8 жыл бұрын

Here! Here!

@dykodesigns

8 жыл бұрын

I would like to see a fairlight cmi one day. would be cool if dave could get his hands on one and have peter vogel on the show.

awesome work dave.

I’ve had a lot of retro tech, but I regret letting my similar HP sci-comp go more than even my vectrex. I cannot find my exact model on KZread, but it had a 1x30-something alphanumeric PCs display. I loaded basic programs from cassette, and it had i/o cable adapters the size of 8-track audio tapes. The HP daisy wheel printer it came with weighed over 50 pounds! Thanks so much for sharing this.

old computer teardowns=best teardowns

Really incredible, it is like returning to the past, thanks!

I used one of these back in 1982(ish)... we had an A3 flat-bed plotter on it which was FAB! I loved the tape cartridges but the "done thing" was to use the 8 inch floppy disk.

The HP85 was designed and built by our sister division in Fort Collins CO. The beast was indestructible. We all wept when it was obsoleted.

@davidflack6430

3 жыл бұрын

A colleague spilt their coffee on one. Dried it out, switched it on and it works. A few keys were a bit sticky for a while.

Watching this video, seeing how serviceable this thing is and comparing it the hoops that Louis Rossmann has to jump through just to get board schematics blows my mind. Vastly different paradigm and imo it's a change for the worse.

Nice video about this awesome vintage machine!

Ahhhhhh, my first computer that I got to use for the company I joined back in October 1980. I was in heaven at what this thing could do. We used this computer in conjunction with an large HP I/O monitoring device for testing and temperature recording. Next came in the apple computers and I was hooked ! Wonderful .....

Great video. No FLASH. :) A big thumbs up.

I think the wide ground strap was intended to make a low impedance path for high frequency noise ( think skin effect ). Probably worried about flyback noise from the crt.

more teardowns!!! awesome video

What a beautiful piece of hardware, thanks for showing :-)

The HP85 was my first computer -- nice to see it again! It was a lot of money for a high school student, but it was not a bad way to learn the concepts of writing software way back in the day.

I have a number of HP85A's from a financial services office, coming into possession of them after the office went to PC's in the 1990's, they came with a plethora of accessories & very well made machines.

awesome channel and video, btw :P

wow this vintage HP computer older than me 6 years old. Awesome teardown

yes!! tear down Tuesday is back!!

"15:30 hopefully I haven't damaged anything there.... " This was the moment he knew... HE FUCKED UP.

Why yes, yes. When as a Softmore in high school, I talked my way into the JR/SR computer programming class and breezed my way through. I used one of these machines. We had a TRS-80 at home and I was way ahead of even the teacher. Great times.

Thanks for the switch shot :)

Dave, please don't kill it! A thing of great beauty :)

Thanks, that inspired me to buy this machine on e-bay. Really great piece of hardware! Ease of programming is also great...

Cool Video and nicely narrated ! I'm for myself a colector of vintage computers - and have seen such a machine at another colector's home here in Moscow)

Closest I ever came was an old CP/M machine that the guy who ran the hardware store gave me after I wrote a basic program for him to keep track of customer's billing on a little Commodore 64 machine, I kept the data on a floppy so he could access it and write new billings and such. He was so thrilled he gave me the old machine that he never could figure out how to use (his wife gave it to him for Christmas) and threw in a brand new multi-speed Dremel tool with accessories. I was happy, and he used the old C=64 for about three years then upgraded to an IBM. I had fun with the CPM machine although it didn't have the games my son wanted for a PC so he flat refused to use it, I found it fun to play around with. The amber screen was easy on the eyes, and the software packages he threw in included a sort of pre-office type with word processing and spreadsheet operations, as well as a great little checkbook program. I was injured and had to lay around my house for a couple of weeks while I healed up, so to kill time, I took our small town phone book and typed it into the old machine, using a database setup, then did a sort by number and printed her out as a reverse lookup book. We kept a copy of that book in our squad car for several years, I also had it sorted by street and house number so you could drive up to a house and find that phone number, then call the resident if need be to clear the house because things were getting sort of dangerous or just asked them to move a vehicle that was illegally parked blocking a neighbors drive way or such crap. It was well worth the effort, and on that old machine, it was very easy because of the quality of the keyboard, something I have never experienced to that degree since I sold the old machine to our local Judge, who wanted it for a backup as he had all his Judge shit on his unit of the same make and model.

My father bought one of these home when I was a kid. HP where trying to sell it to his company. I sat up till about 1 AM playing the game it came with via a tape. The game was moon lander which simulated the lunar Lem descending and you had to guide the decent rate and pitch etc. From memory it had a graphics representation of the Lem and Moon and printed the outcome. Can't remember if i actually landed in one piece or not. Nice to see what was inside the unit - Thanks

I used one of these together with an HP-IB (IEEE 488) connection to some laser measuring equipment back in about 1988. Amazing for its time.

I used one when in astrophysics at the University of Missouri in 1976. It was great not having to use the mainframes to run our programs. Before that, I used an HP 9100 and Olivetti programmable calculator when I majored in electrical engineering at Forest Park College in St Louis in 1974. Great machines!

Love these teardowns. Since you did the first CD player, should try and find the first DVD player!

I purchased one of those back in 1980 and used it to generate cost reports for construction projects in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska

I've waited so long for this. You should go to the garbage room with us more often.

I remember seeing an HP computer similar to this in 1977 being used to to iteratively optimize impedance matching networks for transistor RF power amplifiers. It ran for days on end.

I used one of these in a radio lab for a number of years. Couldn't fault it for the ease of programming it to read and control HP test equipment and other IEEE Bus instruments too. It could carry out the measurement and then print out the results. Just simple and straight forward.

My first job out of school was at HP. We had a good employee discount and I bought almost every calculator and yes had a HP85. You could get a GPIB (HPIB back then) interface module and this made a very nice instrument controller.

I worked briefly for a company that used these in the oil industry. early 80's Every joint that was made on the drill string was recorded on these displaying a correct torque curve on the screen. & recording to tape.

I learned from employee #7 of Compaq Computers, who worked for TI for years prior, that for ESD protection that the best ground strap is a wide thin piece of foil. Because the rise time of an esd discharge waveform is so fast, that skin effects dominate in the overall resistance of the ground strap so a wide thin conductor maximizes your conductivity at the extremely high frequencies involved with an ESD discharge.

I learned BASIC on one of these :-) And that printer drive belt has seen better days. On a new one, it just looked like regular elastic-band material.

The tape looks a lot like the ones I used to backup PCs in the 80s. They were pretty reliable and designed not to stretch or have the other problems that common audio tapes had.

I made a course on HP for those. They were very cute. The tape and the thermal printer were very useful . In HP in Brasil they used them as individual terminals. But in Brazil they had the expansions limited to just one slot. The keyboard was gorgeous for the time.

as great as it is that modern packages like BGA mean we can have very powerful electronics for incredibly small amounts of money, it would be so nice if we could troubleshoot and replace each chip like that.

When HP Was Great !!!!

@marclili4491

8 жыл бұрын

Well yes,and how did they fall so low?The answer is outsourcing.

@hitechespresso

8 жыл бұрын

The answer is : Carly Fiorina. outsourcing? bullshit.

@digerttm

8 жыл бұрын

#MakeHewlettPackardGreatAgain

@aaronbrandenburg2441

3 жыл бұрын

Username agrees with user Avatar.

@ghenghiskhan9473

3 жыл бұрын

@@marclili4491 because of Communist China and greed of corporations to make it abroad

this videos are awesome!!!!

I have one... I want to tear it down and restore it.. It still works! I cant wait to restore it!

Great video. The flying spaghetti monster bless you.

I remember trying to make a GPIB Instrument interface for the HP-85... memories!

What a classy machine.

BYTE magazine initially was a makers journal. Tear downs were natural as building was part of the scene. Circuit board creation, circuit design, programming theory. All very rich. I remember one article where the limits of double sided circuit board were worked around by using narrow circuit boards that were soldered edge to face to create jumpers across the board. Component level to systems evaluation. Later years it changed as the industry provided more advanced products.

Was expecting to see an HPIB (IEEE) socket on there. We used very similar machine for controlling test rigs for soak testing PCM phone transmission equipment (circa 1982 ?). Racks full of beautiful HP test gear all linked up via the HPIB.

Wow, that thing was made 11 days after I was born. Makes me feel real old =)

Hello, Dave!

Volts 12 Watts 8, it was a 8 watt drive, at 12v. What is that 2/3's of an amp? Still pretty beefy.

Very good vidéo. 😀

Are those red connectors seen on the side of the printer assembly still made? I've found them (always in red, for some reason) in lots of old equipment I've taken apart and I quite like them, but I've never seen them in newer stuff.

I bought a couple of years later 87, which is pretty similar to the 85, but with a wider CRT and no printer, also no tape. Instead it had HP-IB, so an external dual floppy unit was the storage. By the way, indeed there was a programmable calculator that preceded the 85 and looked somewhat similar.. That one came out at the same time as a Litton calculator and a Wang calculator. I tested all three and only the HP did its engineering math with exponents correctly. Anyway, I think the 87 had 680 kHz clock. And both the 87 and the 85 had the 8-0register (64-bit) data structure that made the 10E499 numeric range possible. And the expansion module options brought in a serial communication module and a co-processor that ran CP/M on a 4 MHz Z-80. Otherwise, a third party, Bering sold a 5 MB (!) hard disk + an 8-inch floppy unit. I partitioned the 5 MB to 4 sections of 1.2 MB, because the 8-inch floppy could that way be used to back up the hard disk.

This was an early 80's mainstay for controlling HPIB/GPIB instruments.

The RAM on the CRT board is supposedly UP04160-2 16K*1 DRAM, so thats 16K*4 in total. Or 65536 pixels in B/W that would be good enough for 256*256. The reduction to 192 lines may be the wrap area for scrolling the screen. Filling the memory off screen and then set an offset register during the vertical beam return looks much nicer.

Oh those IC's are pretty :)

This data cartridge is identical to a DC2120 (QIC-80) cartridge I was using in the late 90's to do my backups.

anyone know what that little mechanical numeric display is called or what to search to find such displays? very neat indeed

If you take the tape cartridge apart... there's a really interesting drive band which goes round the OUTSIDE of the tape spools.

How did you manage to get one of those. I would love to get hold of one. On the rear case they do show up they are horrifically expensive.

Amazing using IEC for power cords in 79-80

I'd love to own and do absolutely nothing with this beauty :)

Dave you should annotate the other video at 1:04 seems you've forgotten it, otherwise great video and appreciate the teardown.

It reminds me of the Datapoint computers. If I recall they implemented the Intel 8008 in discreet hardware for the initial models.

It appears to be a standard QIC cartridge. Those were used into the 90s with the Travan series being the last iteration.

Looking carefully at the key guides, I see the telltale signs of stress cracks developing at the corners. This was a materials problem with the key guides which developed over the past decades: The guides crack due to the force of the keycap (I think a form of long-term polymer creep imho) at the high stress zones with the resulting increased friction making the keys stick. I have seen key guides with corner reinforcement that eliminate this problem. Waffling onward, I love these machines for the way you can control HPIB gear using the built in HP Basic. Every piece of HP gear I have from the late 1970's through the 1980's (including the 3458A, btw) has numerous examples of BASIC programs for interface, control, and data acquisition. A beautiful piece of HP Engineering; it brings a tear to me eye.....

Check out the isolation traces between the data/address traces near the memory - interesting, especially at less than 1 MHz clock...

Very impressive. The build quality is exceptional throughout. This was definitely built to last. It is a shame that they don't build PCs like this these days. How much did it cost in its day?

I think the stuff that is on the tape drive rod was the rubber that spinned the tape and that is very similar to the tape drives in the 90s and they don't oil the component in the tape that spins

20:30 In old cassette tape decks the spools don't drive the tape over the head. There's a roller and a pin that pinches the tape, and the pin rotates at a constant speed so the play/record speed is consistent over the record/play head. If the the spools controlled the tape then the speed of the tape over the head would change over time as the spools get larger, or deplete.

pretty certain that the font used for the keyboard keys is the same as on the TI 99/4A (at least the tan/cost reduced version)

the clamp it is called "seguer" in Argentina it is used a lot to secure ball bearing

Top-notch quality from the era of HP we all know & love! Very few cut corners & serviceable - imagine that. Maybe that’s why all HP devices from this time period fetch top-dollar on eBay?!

Hey! Cheshire, Connecticut is my town. Neat.

The 85 was a modest success, but the REAL engineering workhorse where I worked (General Dynamics) at the time was the 9845 (and the 9845C with the color screen) Two tape drives and a full page thermal high speed printer in that model. I'd love to see a teardown of a 9845C someday.

very cool up computer. I have one form 90s😥

Be careful with ribbon cables. I had similar cable in the tariff block (a.k.a. clock) that broke quite easily. 20:07 is that motor with optical feedback?