The HP Integral PC (or HP 9807A) is a portable

UNIX Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term ''workstat ...

computer system produced by

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...

, launched in 1985 at a price of £5450. It utilizes the

Motorola 68000 The Motorola 68000 (sometimes shortened to Motorola 68k or m68k and usually pronounced "sixty-eight-thousand") is a 16/32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessor, introduced in 1979 by Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector ...

microprocessor A microprocessor is a computer processor where the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit, or a small number of integrated circuits. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circu ...

(running at 8 MHz) and ran the

HP-UX HP-UX (from "Hewlett Packard Unix") is Hewlett Packard Enterprise's proprietary implementation of the Unix operating system, based on Unix System V (initially System III) and first released in 1984. Current versions support HPE Integrity Ser ...

1.0

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

Hardware

The Integral PC is a mains-powered

portable computer A portable computer is a computer designed to be easily moved from one place to another and included a display and keyboard together, with a single plug, much like later desktop computers called '' all-in-ones'' (AIO), that integrate the sy ...

with a 9-inch amber

electroluminescent Electroluminescence (EL) is an optical and electrical phenomenon, in which a material emits light in response to the passage of an electric current or to a strong electric field. This is distinct from black body light emission resulting from h ...

display with a resolution of 512×255 pixels or 80×25 characters (the 256th line of the display is not used). It also incorporated a 710 kB 3.5" floppy disk drive and an HP ThinkJet

ink-jet printer Inkjet printing is a type of computer printing that recreates a digital image by propelling droplets of ink onto paper and plastic substrates. Inkjet printers were the most commonly used type of printer in 2008, and range from small inexpens ...

. Standard memory capacity was 256 KB ROM plus 512 KB RAM, expandable to 7.5 MB. Expansion slots and an

HP-IB IEEE 488 is a short-range digital communications 8-bit parallel multi-master interface bus specification developed by Hewlett-Packard as HP-IB (Hewlett-Packard Interface Bus). It subsequently became the subject of several standards, and ...

bus were also included. The mechanical design was based on the ideas of the de facto standard HP-85. Within the Integral PC CPU, RAM, ROM, memory management, I/O buffering, system timing and keyboard interface are integrated on a single logic-board. All peripheral units and the 14 connections are built using independent boards. Each board is smaller than a letter sized sheet. To make it easier to check the boards, each board contains an own timer. The I/O-board (with two connections for optional addons), the keyboard-interface, the "Human Interface Link" HP-HIL and the power supply can be checked and tested independently. The graphics processor of the Integral PC (

GPU A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobil ...

) was custom made and could drive an electroluminescence display or nearly every kind of monitor. The processor provides a graphical subsystem which is simple to use to drive a bitmapped display (32 KB display memory). The GPU is able to draw lines, rectangles and alphanumerical characters by hardware. Additionally it provides a hardware cursor and the display-RAM-interface. The electroluminescence-display was based on thin-film-technique developed by HP and other companies.

Software

The Integral PC is unusual in that the HP-UX operating system

kernel Kernel may refer to: Computing * Kernel (operating system), the central component of most operating systems * Kernel (image processing), a matrix used for image convolution * Compute kernel, in GPGPU programming * Kernel method, in machine learnin ...

resided in the ROM, which also included the HP Windows

graphical user interface The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

and the Personal Applications Manager (PAM). HP-UX commands and utilities were supplied separately on

floppy disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined w ...

, with separate disks for standard Unix commands (including the C shell), utilities, diagnostics and system programming resources. There was an add on ROM that provides HP-BASIC. Using the ROM, the Integral PC was ready to run BASIC simply by switching on the system.

References

* * Integral PC 68k-based computers {{compu-hardware-stub

Hardware

Software

See also

References