HP Forum Archive 13

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OM-D30V: Anyone remember these disks? Message #1 Posted by Mike on 11 July 2003, 2:02 p.m. I have a 9121 that uses the older vintage Sony Disks (OM-D30V) that had the manual shutter. Anyone remember those? The ones shown are marked HP. I'm not sure if these were actually made by Sony or not but I believe Sony was first and they do say "Made in Japan" on the back. You had to slide the shutter to the open position, where it would be latched (see latch in photo), then afer you removed the disk, you had to pinch the corner to cause the shutter to spring back to the closed position. The center photo shows the latching mechanism. You pinch the corner and the latch releases the shutter. When I first obtained this drive, I thought it was broken, since I couldn't insert a floppy. Thought it was jammed . After a little investigation, I found that it used the old Sony drives. Vintage Computer Fourm Edited: 11 July 2003, 3:14 p.m.

Re: OM-D30V: Anyone remember these disks? Message #2 Posted by David Ramsey on 11 July 2003, 6:45 p.m., in response to message #1 by Mike When I moved out to California in 1983, I had a friend working at "Muppet Labs" inside HP. He showed me some of their new DOS touch screen computers, which used these disks. This was before the Mac and there were at least three different types of 3.5" disks at the time, including one that was just like a miniature 5.25" floppy. The touch screens used a grid of infrared beams to determine where your finger was. The resolution for the entire screen was, I think, 32 x 32.

Re: OM-D30V: Anyone remember these disks? Message #3 Posted by Raymond Del Tondo on 11 July 2003, 9:15 p.m., in response to message #2 by David Ramsey Hi, it was the HP-150 resp. the HP-150II TouchScreen PC The resolution of the screen was something about Hercules-like, only the touch screen resolution was much lower, but sufficient for finger usage. There were at least two variations of that TouchScreen. One with the grid frame only, where you tapped on the screen glass directly, and another with kinda transparent elastic membrane, so to hide the screen glass from finger prints;-) My HP-150II TouchScreen PC the 'grid frame only' display frame. BTW: You could order the grid frame separately. On the motherboard of the HP-150II is a connector for the frame. Regards, Raymond

HP 150 -- diskettes and stuff Message #4 Posted by Katie on 11 July 2003, 10:48 p.m., in response to message #3 by Raymond Del Tondo I had several of both the HP150's and the HP150II's at my client's offices. They used lower density 3.5" diskettes (around 700KB) but the shutters worked automatically. There was also a program that allowed you to read these on a regular PC and vice versa even thought the formatting was different. The resolution of the touch screen was pretty horrible. However, the 150's (at least the early ones) were supplied with a demo diskette that had several touch screen games on it. I thought that HP's touch screen was a perfect match for their solitaire game, and was pretty convinced that that was the reason why they invested it! :) Edited: 11 July 2003, 10:48 p.m.

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