HP 9825a

[Geoff Quickfall]

It's been sitting on my desk for the last three years. Works except for the tape drive of course but I have done nothing with it.

So today while the hot water tank in the house was being replaced with an on-demand-tankless system I thought I would take it apart.

What a dream to work on. All modular and plenty of room. To date I have:

1) Removed all boards and cleaned all connections and applied contact enhancer to all plug connectors

2) reseated non-soldered ICs.

3) removed printer, tape drive and led display modules to allow access to the tape/display/printer bezel.

4) removed the tape/display/printer bezel to be shipped with the tape drive module to Larry Atherton for refurbishment to modern QIC tapes.

5) removed keyboard and then removed keyboard PCA from keyboard.

6) soaked keyboard in luke warm water and a small amount of liquid detergent to solve sticky keyboard and bouncy keys agitating also. After five thorough rinses keyboard is now being air dried via forced air. It will be stored for awhile in a drying box full of drying silica pouches. Then it will be treated with deoxit contact enhancer via the small pores on the reverse side of the keyboard. This was a must as one of the F keys was generating a looped error 30 message due to being stuck down/on.

7) the outer shell has been cleaned, third party labels removed.

8) it should look pretty new when reassembled. Of course it should work perfectly.

Have taken a series of pictures of the diassembly and will document them later.


This is the chicklet keyboard machine with 15036 bytes of RAM. I have the string, advance programming and IO modules.

Have a question though. The keyboard PCA is attached to the keyboard and keys by a series of tiny screws on the reverse of th keyboard PCA. After removing these I thought I would have access to the keys and contacts. But no, the PCA seems to be glued or fixed permanently to the keyboard assembly. Has anyone taken the chicklet keyboard apart for servicing?

Will be in London at HPPC this Saturday so I will be able to talk to Tony Duell in person about it.

Cheers, Geoff