I'm glad to hear that you got the drive spinning. Too bad that one of the heads is broken in the floppy, but I believe that the HP 9000/300 series used generic PC-style 720k floppy drives. - Alex On Fri, Dec 22, 2017 at 1:52 PM, Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
J. Alexander Jacocks (Alex) did acquire those HP 9000's and brought a few to Festivus. I want to acknowledge and thank him for his efforts. I was one who acquired a 9000/300 and a hard/floppy drive. VCFed Museum got a set also, as did others. Not a big priority for me, but I used HP computing equipment in the era, I have a number of HP test equipment items, and so on.
Alex particularly worked hard at my request, to try to generate a boot floppy during the event. I literally had to pry his fingers from his laptop, as he tried to get 21st century technology to generate 1980's 3.5" floppies. My "cave man" needs were simply to see the floppy drive acknowledged during boot-up.
Since the event, I got the hard drive - old MFM 5.25 inch drive - to operate; the system comes up in BASIC. I have two 800K floppy drives working (a third has a broken head).
I'm hampered in looking it over, by the lack of a proper monochrome monitor. It's a composite video, my guess 30Khz horizontal rate. I'd like to obtain a monitor, or futz with some other monitor. So I'd like to know the scan rate and other video-format data. Again, my thanks to Alex Jacocks.
Herb Johnson
Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey in the USA http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net