HP HP-2117F on ebay

[Christian Corti]

On Wed, 13 Dec 2006, Jay West wrote:
>> No bids yet.
> And hopefully there won't be... unless you want parts - cause it's got 
> issues.

Many issues...

> 1) The power supply for the cpu has been pulled (ie. is not present). That 
> doesn't bode well ;)

And you can't just fit in a standard PC power supply...

> 2) The DCPC card (that's DMA to you and me) appears to be missing and the 
> cable is dangling. This was standard on the 2117 (1000F aka 21MX/F) I think.

Yes, it was standard and it's missing.

> 3) There is NO memory, nor a memory controller in the box, they appear to 
> have been snagged.

No memory, no memory controller, nothing...

> 4) Either the FEM board has been pulled, or they just used the wrong cable to 
> connect the FAB to the cpu board. Given that slot 10 is empty and thus 
> creates a break in the interrupt chain, I'm guessing the former. That means 
> you're likely missing microcode. Could just be vendor microcode... or your 
> base instruction set ;)

Of the three 1000F I have all have their firmware in slot 10 on a FAB 
because the mainboard simply doesn't have enough sockets for all the ROMs.

> 5) There appears to be something homebrew on the TBG board in slot 11. At 
> least it's nothing I've ever seen. Given the RPL markings on the front this 
> tends to make me think of process control. Maybe the cable was to allow some 
> other device to generate the time based interrupts.

Doesn't hurt.

> 8) Note the 8 channel mux card is not compatible with TSB. Note also the 
> non-standard edge card connection. PSI board?

All 8 channel muxes have these edge card connections.

> 9) 7970 tape controller set, handy to have.

Not sure whether it's the controller for the 7970B or 7970E.

> 10) Two microcircuit boards. I happen to REALLY like these. If anyone buys 
> this sytem, I'd be willing to pay for one or two of these cards :)

These are simple digital I/O boards. But thanks to DCPC any board supports 
DMA :-)

> 12) Don't recognize the board in slot 23.

Same as in slot 13.

> On the plus side, it IS an F series... the FP unit is auctioned separately

Well, it isn't an F series. An F series consists of the proper firmware 
ROMs (SIS, VIS, FFP, FPP) and the external FP processor, but everything's 
missing. You could plug in the firmware from an E series, and then it's a 
1000E.
My machine here also has the RTE6 and SIGNAL/1000 firmware ROMs.

> I am not familiar enough with the F series to know if that FP unit includes 
> all the necessary boards and/or connectors.

I think it's complete, but the cables are missing (especially the 
connection from the FPP to the MPP on the CPU front panel).

Christian