HP HIL Adapter, which allows standard PC keyboards and mice to be added to an HIL host. Note the pass-through port on the right, which allowed other HIL devices to be daisy-chained through this one.
The HP-HIL (Hewlett-Packard Human Interface Link) is the name of a computer bus used by Hewlett-Packard to connect keyboards, mice, trackballs, digitizers, tablets, barcode readers, rotary knobs, touchscreens, and other human interface peripherals to their HP 9000 workstations. The bus was in use until the mid-1990s, when HP substituted PS/2 technology for HIL. The PS/2 peripherals were themselves replaced with USB-connected models.
The HIL bus is a daisy-chain of up to 7 devices, running at a raw clock speed of 8MHz. Each HIL device typically has an output connector, and an input connector to which the next device in the chain plugs; the exception is the mouse which has only the output connector.
The HP-HIL bus uses specific 4-pin, 6-pin, or 8-pin SDL connectors, somewhat similar to the 8P8C 8-pin modular connector commonly (though incorrectly) called the RJ-45. The bus can reportedly also use a 9-pin D-subminiature DE-9 connector.
A HIL to PS/2 converter is available, namely the HP A4220-62001.
In computer architecture, a bus is a communication system that transfers data between components inside a computer, or between computers. This expression covers all related hardware components and software, including communication protocols.
PA-RISC is an instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Hewlett-Packard. As the name implies, it is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architecture, where the PA stands for Precision Architecture. The design is also referred to as HP/PA for Hewlett Packard Precision Architecture.
The Single UNIX Specification (SUS) is the collective name of a family of standards for computer operating systems, compliance with which is required to qualify for using the "UNIX" trademark. The core specifications of the SUS are developed and maintained by the Austin Group, which is a joint working group of IEEE, ISO JTC 1 SC22 and The Open Group. If an operating system is submitted to The Open Group for certification, and passes conformance tests, then it is deemed to be compliant with a UNIX standard such as UNIX 98 or UNIX 03.
In computing, a parallel port is a type of interface found on computers for connecting peripherals. The name refers to the way the data is sent; parallel ports send multiple bits of data at once, as opposed to serial communication, in which bits are sent one at a time. To do this, parallel ports require multiple data lines in their cables and port connectors and tend to be larger than contemporary serial ports, which only require one data line.
InfiniBand (IB) is a computer networking communications standard used in high-performance computing that features very high throughput and very low latency. It is used for data interconnect both among and within computers. InfiniBand is also used as either a direct or switched interconnect between servers and storage systems, as well as an interconnect between storage systems. It is designed to be scalable and uses a switched fabric network topology.
IEEE 488 is a short-range digital communications 8-bit parallel multi-master interface bus specification developed by Hewlett-Packard as HP-IB. It subsequently became the subject of several standards, and is generically known as GPIB.
In computer storage, logical volume management or LVM provides a method of allocating space on mass-storage devices that is more flexible than conventional partitioning schemes to store volumes. In particular, a volume manager can concatenate, stripe together or otherwise combine partitions into larger virtual partitions that administrators can re-size or move, potentially without interrupting system use.
Unix System V is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by AT&T and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, numbered 1, 2, 3, and 4. System V Release 4 (SVR4) was commercially the most successful version, being the result of an effort, marketed as Unix System Unification, which solicited the collaboration of the major Unix vendors. It was the source of several common commercial Unix features. System V is sometimes abbreviated to SysV.
The HP-IL, was a short-range interconnection bus or network introduced by Hewlett-Packard in the early 1980s. It enabled several devices such as printers, floppy disk drives, tape readers, etc. to be connected to programmable calculators such as the HP-41C, HP-71B and HP-75C/D, the 80-series and HP-110 computers, as well as generic ISA bus based PCs.
A human interface device or HID is a type of computer device usually used by humans that takes input from humans and gives output to humans.
IEEE 1284 is a standard that defines bi-directional parallel communications between computers and other devices. It was originally developed in the 1970s by Centronics, and was widely known as the Centronics port, both before and after its IEEE standardization.
HP 9000 is a line of workstation and server computer systems produced by the Hewlett-Packard Company (HP). The native operating system for almost all HP 9000 systems is HP-UX, which is based on UNIX System V. The HP 9000 brand was introduced in 1984 to encompass several existing technical workstation models previously launched in the early 1980s.
A general-purpose input/output (GPIO) is an uncommitted digital signal pin on an integrated circuit or electronic circuit board which may be used as an input or output, or both, and is controllable by the user at runtime.
Super I/O is a class of I/O controller integrated circuits that began to be used on personal computer motherboards in the late 1980s, originally as add-in cards, later embedded on the motherboards. A super I/O chip combines interfaces for a variety of low-bandwidth devices. The functions below are usually provided by the super I/O if they are on the motherboard:
The PS/2 port is a 6-pin mini-DIN connector used for connecting keyboards and mice to a PC compatible computer system. Its name comes from the IBM Personal System/2 series of personal computers, with which it was introduced in 1987. The PS/2 mouse connector generally replaced the older DE-9 RS-232 "serial mouse" connector, while the PS/2 keyboard connector replaced the larger 5-pin/180° DIN connector used in the IBM PC/AT design. The PS/2 keyboard port is electrically and logically identical to the IBM AT keyboard port, differing only in the type of electrical connector used. The PS/2 platform introduced a second port with the same design as the keyboard port for use to connect a mouse; thus the PS/2-style keyboard and mouse interfaces are electrically similar and employ the same communication protocol. However, unlike the otherwise similar Apple Desktop Bus connector used by Apple, a given system's keyboard and mouse port may not be interchangeable since the two devices use different sets of commands and the device drivers generally are hard-coded to communicate with each device at the address of the port that is conventionally assigned to that device.
In Unix-like operating systems, a device file or special file is an interface to a device driver that appears in a file system as if it were an ordinary file. There are also special files in DOS, OS/2, and Windows. These special files allow an application program to interact with a device by using its device driver via standard input/output system calls. Using standard system calls simplifies many programming tasks, and leads to consistent user-space I/O mechanisms regardless of device features and functions.
HP X-Terminals are a line of X terminals from Hewlett Packard introduced in the early- to mid-1990s, including the 700/X and 700/RX, Envizex and Entria, and the Envizex II and Entria II. They were often sold alongside PA-RISC-based HP 9000 Unix systems. The primary use case was connecting several graphical consoles to a single server or workstation to allow multiple users access the same (expensive) processing system from terminal systems. These X-Terminals all allowed high-resolution, color-graphics access to the main server from which they downloaded their operating system and necessary program files. All models featured limited expandability, in most cases additional I/O options for peripherals and memory for more programs or local storage. HP did not use its own PA-RISC platform for these systems, the first design used an Intel CISC processor, while all later systems used RISC platforms, first Intel i960 and later the popular MIPS.
The HP Integral PC was a portable UNIX workstation computer system produced by Hewlett-Packard, launched in 1985 at a price of £5450. It was based on the Motorola 68000 microprocessor and ran the HP-UX 1.0 operating system.
HP Vectra was a line of business-oriented personal computers manufactured by Hewlett-Packard. It was introduced in October 1985 as HP's first IBM-compatible PC.
The Serial Input/Output system, universally known as SIO, was a proprietary peripheral bus and related software protocol stacks used on the Atari 8-bit family to provide most input/output duties for those computers. Unlike most I/O systems of the era, such as RS-232, SIO included a lightweight protocol that allowed multiple devices to be attached to a single daisy-chained port that supported dozens of devices. It also supported plug-and-play operations. SIO's designer, Joe Decuir, credits his work on the system as the basis of USB.
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