HP HP-2117F on ebay

[Jay West]

Christian wrote....
>> 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.

Ok, this piqued my curiosity so I went to the manuals and checked.

The F series consists of the 2111F and the 2117F. The 2117F has an external 
hardware floating point unit mounted in a rackmount chassis underneath the 
cpu chassis. The 2111F also has a hardware floating point unit, but it is 
not mounted in a external chassis. It is mounted INSIDE the normal 1000 
series chassis. I'd be curious to see just how that was done! There is 
obviously no room for the same physical parts. Perhaps it was put in the 
memory cage and the cable run to the MPP port? In any case, it must have 
been a very different card(s) (although functionally equivalent). Aha... I 
just found a picture in the manual that may elucidate this. The 2111 chassis 
is just as tall as the 2117 chassis, but it has 5 less I/O & memory slots at 
the top. Methinks the space at the top is where a 2111F specific hardware 
floating point unit must go.

So, an F series doesn't always have the external FP processor. They all do 
have hardware floating point processors as separate systems. Oddly enough, 
the 2111F doesn't have DMS as standard while the 2117F does. That accounts 
for the difference in instruction set counts.

Jay