[rescue] HP 9000 / 300 -- can anyone help with this?

Ian Finder ian.finder at gmail.com
Tue Aug 9 17:41:28 CDT 2005


Hello all. At a recent VCF (the midwest one) I purchased an HP 9000/300
With the resources online, I've still been unable to tell what kind of
300 series system
this machine is. It's case is about as tall as a sparcstation LX, but
wider and lengthier. It has nothing but a power switch and light on
the front panel. The main system board has a m68030 cpu, with an empty
plcc (i think) socket next to it. There is a bank of 8 dip switches on
the right side of the board (if facing the ports) near the HP-IB port.
The system board has the following connections, left to right.

RS-232 (DB25-f), VIDEO (single RCA-F jack), SPKR (single RCA-f  jack),
HP-HIL jack (Don't wory about that, I have crates of HP-HIL crap
here), HP-IB jack.

It has a network card and a second HP-IB card. I would like to get
this to netboot NETbsd, or better yet find some HP-IB disk systems
(anyone got em' ?) and let it boot HockeyPUX-- hell, or netboot
hockeypux. But therein lies the problem-- aside from the HP-HIL
keyboards from my dead 735s, and my AUI-TP ethernet tranciver, I've
got nothing else that will work with this. How do I hook up a monitor
to it. I hear that it can take a color display card that has RGB bnc
jacks on it. Does anyone here have such a card, and could I buy it
from you if you do, or is there another way to hook up a display I may
already have other than that? Can I get this thing to show any signs
of life other than a power light with something I have here? (like a
serial console). Is there any way for me to utilize the monochrome
video out without getting yet another monitor?

Any help getting this thing to work would be greatly appreciated, as
I'd really like to get it working and add it to my collection of
obscure computers.

Any would be GREATLY appreciated,
and thanks in advance for [hopefully] the replies.

--Ian Finder

PS: I posted something similar to this to the sunhelp list with
details on both this machine and some sparcstation LXes-- I meant to
post it to rescue, but I get helped with the suns there anyways so
they've been excluded from this post. Sorry for the psuedo-double
post.



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