HP PRIME version from SN?

[rprosperi]

(03-18-2020 06:14 PM)Orome Wrote:  

cdmackay Wrote:  Since the Prime only came out in late 2013, and your software rev is Nov 2013, it seems reasonable to assume that's a very early model, surely Rev A, and not updated since, for some reason?

Yes, I think that's right. I'm pretty sure I got it as soon as I heard about it. (Can I update it? I've never had any success trying.)

The question though is how to generally get from an SN to the model: is there a rubric; is the model encoded in the SN in any way?

You can (and should immediately) update it using the HP ConnKit. I think the current CK will work even on machines that go back that far; and BTW, that's why the h/w revision isn't shown, at that time there was only a single h/w revision.

As for decoding the s/n to figure out your version, no, the version is not encoded into the s/n; the s/n specifies the place and rough date of manufacture only (see the latter part of description here: https://www.hpmuseum.org/collect.htm#numbers).

With enough samples (model and s/n) submitted by owners, one could theoretically figure out which models fall into which time frames, etc., but the tradition here is to not do that until 20-30 years after the machine was introduced.