Posts: 149
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Joined: Feb 2009
FWIW HP used to sell a program called Instrument BASIC that ran on the PC but it was a bug filled flop.
They now have an HP BASIC for Windows. That would probably run the HP 86 programs but I don't know if it implements all the HP 86 commands or if it supports HP-IB. If it does support HP-IB you would have to add a HP-IB card to the PC. There is a program available called LIFUTIL that it supposed to transfer files between a HP LIF disk and a MS-DOS machine but it's difficult to use. The program itself is simple but it doesn't find the disk ID byte most of the time so it can't translate most HP disks. IF you know where the disk ID byte is located, you can use a binary editor to read it and store it where the LIF UTIL expects to find it and then the LIF UTIL will work. HP has placed LIF UTIL in the public domain and you used to be able to find it at "ftp://fcext3.external.hp.com/dist/mxd/pc/old/obsolete/index.html". HP has changed some of their URLs so you have to find out what it's been changed to. Also before you convert a HP program, you must save it in an ASCII format. They're normally stored in a tokenized format. If you convert them all you'll get will be gibberish.
Sorry I don't have time to locate all the disk ID bytes but one of the other regular readers has been working on that. Perhaps he'll post a list of locations and more details about how to do it.
Here's another site that has the LIF UTIL. "ftp://ftp.math.jyu.fi/pub/hpil". LIF2DOS is a similar utility and it's also posted there.