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I'm looking for info on the HP-9000 Series 300. It's an HP-UX system that was commonly used as instrument controllers. The model that I am working on is an M68k10 based system - part # 98561X. It dates to about 1985. The system powers up and passes the self-test, but there is no boot device.

What type of system disk did these use? How does it connect to the system? (HP-IB ??) What are the part #'s for typical drives?

I used some of the early HP9000 series minis. Yes, the HP-IB interface is used to connect disk drives (and tape drives, and printers...)

Almost any HPIB drive should work, I don't know the part numbers, but when these were released, drives were advancing from washing machine sized 404Mb drives to 5 1/4 full height 1Gb drives (and very quickly too!)

If you can find almost any HPIB drive, and bootable tape, and an HPIB tape drive to suit, you'll be on your way. It may not be too big an ask, I'm sure there are people out there today with perfectly well working HP9000 HPIB based equipment that would be compatible. It's finding a bootable tape that may be difficult...

I have also been curious about these small HP's. I have a Series 9000 model 340 (98571X)I bough at surplus. The serial number starts with 28 so I think it is from 1988. The machine has HP-IB, HP-HIL (not HP-IL!) RS-232 and a coax LAN interface. The keyboard and mouse are connected through the HP-HIL interface. There are RGB coax outputs for video, I used a Sony monitor to check the unit out. The computer runs from ROM firmware, running some type of LAN monitor software. I have no idea what the machine could be used for and have no use for it myself. Anybody got a use for it? I would be interested in software for it or someone else can have it for $50.

There are a couple of BSD-unices available for the HP300 series: OpenBSD (http://www.openbsd.org/) and NetBSD (http://www.netbsd.org/). I've not used these operating systems on the HP300 series, but I've used OpenBSD on both the i386/Sun4c architectures, and it works well.

Have fun!

If I remember correctly, the 340 was a 68030-based machine able to run HP-UX. We usually ran them as diskless machines -- is the "lan monitor software" the bootrom trying to boot HP-UX DUX over the network? I think you should be able to boot it using an HP-IB disk with HP-UX 8.0 or earlier on it.

Interesting idea, I will try hooking a GPIB disk drive to it and see if it tries to read during the boot sequence. My basic problem is I am flying completely blind. Does anyone know where to get the manuals or info on a 340 or the 300 series, for example the internal DIP switch functions??

I can probably dig up the information, since I work where the 300s were produced. I'll see what I can find.