The HP 7935 is a business computer hard disc drive system manufactured by Hewlett Packard. It was produced by the Disc Memory Division [1] in Boise, Idaho USA beginning in 1982 [2] at a cost of about $27,000. [3] Within the company the drive was known as the "BFD", ostensibly an acronym for "big fixed disc" but the development engineers had used that acronym for "big fucking disc"[ citation needed ], a term relative to the smaller 7920 series drives introduced earlier by the company.
The 7935 had four bottom mounted casters for moving and four lock-down feet for stability in the computer room.
The drive's linear motor was so powerful if the feet were not down, when in operation the drive could literally move about the computer room.
Height: 82.5 cm (32.5 inches), Width: 55.2 cm (21.7 inches), Depth: 83.4 cm (32.8 inches), 154 kg (339.5 lb.) [4]
The HP7935 allowed the user to remove and install a 404 megabyte model 97935 Disc Pack. [5]
The HP7933 was the same basic drive with a disc pack only removable by service personnel. [6]
The 793x series provided a 300% increase in capacity of the HP 7925 at only a slightly increased cost. Performance-wise, the 7935 had a 15-20% performance decrease compared to the 7925. Apparently modifications were made by HP, in a program called the Performance Enhancement Project, raising 7935 performance 15% making it comparable to the older model. [7]
The HP 7935/33 achieved a track density of 625 tracks per inch (considered high at the time), achieving capacity using 7 platters, 13 data surfaces and 14 heads (one head and surface were used for servo data). The disc pack spun at 2694 RPM. [8]
Despite an extensive air purging spin-up sequence to prevent disc and head contamination, human users reportedly caused so many 7935 packs to have disc head crashes, many users simply purchased the 7933.
The 7935H had a HP-IB interface mounted in the rear. The drive's front panel had a key pad for running internal disc drive diagnostics, a LED character display, a load and unload button, and a lid opening button.
The 7935G was a bundled package of three 7935H units at a reduced cost of $74,000.
The 7933 and 7935 drives were often used with the HP 3000 series family of minicomputers and later in early versions of the HP 9000 series computers. [5] Drives were connected via the HP-IB interface to the host computer and multiple drives could be connected in a daisy-chain. The HP-IB address of the drive was selectable via DIP switches next to the interface.
The robustness of the drive hardware was tested by the 7.1 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The HP campus in Cupertino had 1,682 HP 7935 drives operating at the time of the quake and 97.25 percent were still operational afterwards. Within an hour, only 2 percent were non-operational and only 1.5 percent were non-operational several days later. [9]
Later with development and production of smaller, rack mountable, high-density, sealed HP disc drive units using Winchester mechanism designs (like the HP 7963), the demand for HP793x drive line declined.
A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a type of smaller general-purpose computer developed in the mid-1960s and sold at a much lower price than mainframe and mid-size computers from IBM and its direct competitors. In a 1970 survey, The New York Times suggested a consensus definition of a minicomputer as a machine costing less than US$25,000, with an input-output device such as a teleprinter and at least four thousand words of memory, that is capable of running programs in a higher level language, such as Fortran or BASIC.
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IMAGE is a database management system (DBMS) developed by Hewlett-Packard and included with the HP 3000 minicomputer. It was the primary reason for that platform's success in the market. It was also sometimes referred to as IMAGE/3000 in its initial release, and later versions were known as TurboIMAGE, and TurboIMAGE/XL after the PA-RISC migration.
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The HP 300 "Amigo" was a computer produced by Hewlett-Packard (HP) in the late 1970s based loosely on the stack-based HP 3000, but with virtual memory for both code and data. The HP300 was cut-short from being a commercial success despite the huge engineering effort, which included HP-developed and -manufactured silicon on sapphire (SOS) processor and I/O chips.
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The HP 64000 Logic Development System, introduced 17 September 1979, is a tool for developing hardware and software for products based on commercial microprocessors from a variety of manufacturers. The systems assisted software development with assemblers and compilers for Pascal and C, provided hardware for in-circuit emulation of processors and memory, had debugging tools including logic analysis hardware, and a programmable read-only memory (PROM) chip programmer. A wide variety of optional cards and software were available tailored to particular microprocessors. When introduced the HP 64000 had two distinguishing characteristics. First, unlike most microprocessor development systems of the day, such as the Intel Intellec and Motorola EXORciser, it was not dedicated to a particular manufacturer's microprocessors, and second, it was designed such that up to six workstations could be connected via the HP-IB (IEEE-488) instrumentation bus to a common hard drive and printer to form a tightly integrated network.
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