Origin of the term minicomputer (was Re: PDP-1 as minicomputer

[Tony Duell]

> 
> Tony Duell wrote:
> > I will take a look. I assume it's in BASIC, and given that the 
> Yes it is, sorry.  It only consists of about 80 lines of code.  Now that 
> I look at it a bit more carefully, there are some calls to things like 
> SCALE, PLOT, CPLOT, etc. which are said to be included in the "plug-in 
> Plotter Control ROM".  The text also specifies a plotter, though it does 
> not seem to mention a model number.

I've taken a look...

It looks like standard HP9830 BASIC, with commands from the plotter ROM. 
The user manual for the plotter ROM is available from the Australian 
museum site (http://www.hpmuseum.net/) as a .pdf file. That site is not 
easy to find your way aroumd, I find the easiest thing to do is to follow 
the 'documents' (or is it 'documentation', I forget, but it's pretty clear) 
link from the homepage and read down that list until you find the manual 
you want/ The HP9830 plotter ROM is the HP11271 IIRC, so search the list 
of manuals for that. It's pretty obvious...

It should then be fairly easy to traslate this program for another 
machine. Whether or not you'd want to is another matter. Personally, I 
enjoy some old games on the origjnal hardware, but see little interest on 
them running on modern machines, or even under emulators. We know youcan 
get much 'better' games on modern hardware, the fun is seeing what you 
could do with a machine i nthe early 70's. But anyway...

I think there is an HP9830 emulator. Again, I've never run it (I doubt I 
have anythign it would run on...). I suspect that would run the program...

-tony