Back in 1976, our high school received a DECwriter II that was connected to the University of Northern Iowa also located in Cedar Falls. I was already programming as a sophomore, so this was where I spent all my free time. I would also ride my bike up to the campus to Baker Hall where they had the HP2000 system setup. There were a pair of ASR-33 teletypes in the front for students to use but didn’t mind that high schoolers like myself could use too. During the next year or so, there were two students on campus that wrote an awesome DnD game. I would head to Saben or Wright Hall after school or on the weekends and play the game. At one point, there were lines of students waiting to play this game, so much so that it turned out to be almost the only thing the HP2000 was used for.

Somewhere in that timeframe, I was able to print out almost all the source to the three modules; DND, which CHAIN’d to *DRAGON for the setup, then *LORDS to keep track of the heroes of the dungeon. It was spectacular in the whole adventure of this game!

Fast forward to 2022..,. I now have a perfect restored ASR-33 teletype, a virtually NIB Digital DECwriter II, and the SIMH HP2100 Timeshare System running on the Internet with my two terminals connected. I just started typing in the source for this fantastic game, but am sill missing the DRAGON source, so I thought I’d post up here in the hopes that one of the two original authors would also stumble across this page. The only hints I have are that there are two Wizards in the game play, named Mage Stone and Mage Lauterbach, (which I presume are real last names?!).

I’ll get the game running, but it would be extra special if I had the original source for DRAGON as opposed to what I will replace it with.

If anyone else has heard of this game or has any info or memories of playing it at UNI, I would love to compare notes. PS: I also wrote the DOS telecommunications program called Qmodem back in the day, so I should be easy to find me on the Internet.

Cheers!

John Friel III

I used to play around with an HP-2000C system when I was in high school - we'd dial in at 110 baud on old TTY ASR-33s. This was in 1973-1974.

I once wrote a program that would decrypt encrypted files (can't remember the term that was used for them), but the had to be strings only, and one had to guess correctly at the first two characters. A few months after that, HP came out with new encryption. The old version was just a 16-bit exclusive OR.

Never did take a computer class in high school, but it was enough to provide the line of work I would later go into - programming (I'm a CICS/DB2/WebsphereMQ systems programmer).

Sometimes several of us would be in the teletype room, logged on at the same time when the system operator would send a notification that they were bringing the system down. So we'd start sending them messages. Seems the system console would ignore what the operator typed if a message came in before he finished. One-by-one the operator would manage to disable each terminal (not sure how he did this) until he could enter the shutdown commands.

One of my favorite commands was LPR. Some unsuspecting person would come wandering into the "computer room" and a tale would be told that the computer could send out records, when it had them. And to prove the point, since the HP system would eliminate spaces in commands, I'd type:

LP RECORDS, HAVE ANY?

To which it would reply:

LPR NOT AVAILABLE

The person would walk away amazed.

Used to have both a 2000C and 2000E BASIC manuals, but they've long ago been tossed.

Nice web site! Glad some others remember the system.

I stumbled across your site today. Nice to see collectors interested in the venerable HP 2000! I used one of these systems in high school 1982-83. The Orange Unified School District, Orange, California had an agreement with Santa Ana Community College to share time on a central HP 2000/Access system. There were two terminals in each location: a CRT (ADM 3A in our lab) and a printing terminal (DEC LA?? DecWriter). The terminals were connected by 300-baud modem over dedicated phone lines to the college's data center.

I remember typing [return] [line feed] to get the login prompt, then HEL-O147,,3 with a control-character password between the two commas. A welcome message and cute little Ready prompt then appeared. One time I obtained the password for group-level ID O100 and thought it pretty cool to have access to "priviledged" commands. Never divined the A000 password, though...not that I really tried, mind you! ;-)

Several enterprising students at another school developed a program called Talker. It was a primitive BBS with conversational chat ability. We ran it by entering something like RUN "TALKER.????" (don't remember the other school's user ID) and had lots of fun relaying messages and real-time messenging.

Even though our school had Apple IIs in the lab I preferred using the HP system. For some reason the concept of a central machine accessed from disparate locations was inherently fascinating. To this day I prefer working with IBM mainframes and "green screen" systems instead of PCs.

Since we shared the computer between different high schools we had all kinds of fun [and trouble] on it.

I remember the first time I was able to scarf the A000 password. What a joy! Some maniac in the lab at the college gave it to me. We wrote multi-user editors on the system and were able to disable the break-keys remotely on users who accessed our programs. We put the computer into slave mode and could read files off of the accessing user's account. What power!

We didn't hassle anyone except the operators [of course] and it turned into quite an educational programming experience. The operators wanted our butts in a sling as we were a source of constant embarassment. Especially when the host school started to tighten up the reigns on the 2000's use.

Having A000 made things fun. Eventually I was caught but my high school teacher let me hook into the A000 via a program that was never used. So I retained some of the capabilities I wanted w/out having the A000 account.

Mainly we were prohibited from running games on the system and a lot of the games were kept on A001. We were, after all, pioneers in multi-user gaming. So I added a workaround on the A000 to let us run protected programs on any account. Whew!

All in all it was great fun. Until I got my first Unix (NeXT) system years later I never had so much fun again.

I have listings of some of the software that was on that system. Some of it was unique. Let me know if I should look around for it.

Oh did I say I took a brief summer class on how to maintain the system there from some "gleebin programmer" who was an operator? He hadn't seen my face so he never knew I was one of the guys he wanted nailed to the wall.

There are some earlier stories from people I've heard from before it was a 2000A. I believe it started life as a 2000E and only had a few terminals. The machine was upgraded to a 2000A. At least that's what I was told. In the days that it was a 2000E people [before my time] enjoyed open access to it. I don't know why... it must have been a very expensive paper weight for the college! The decwriters came later... in those days it had paper-tape terminals connected to it. Fortunately I missed those and dealt w/ the decwriter and adm3a terminal.

In any case this machine served as an education about what to do and what not to do on a multi-user computer system. It was a wonder. The BASIC was similar to that on the TRS-80s [much more recent] so I found that to be quite useful at the time.

I used an HP 2000 in high school back in 1979. I remember it well. I think my account number was E770. My friends and I would spend hours after school in the computer room, hacking BASIC programs out on 110 baud Decwriters. Or we'd waste reams and reams of paper playing Star Trek.

One day I figured out how to issue some command to the terminal that would disable the BREAK key. I wrote a program that would wait a few minutes, disable BREAK, and then proceed to spit paper out of the Decwriter as fast as it could. I ran it and left the room! My teacher was not impressed.

Another time, I got into a fight in the computer room with a football player who kept picking up the phone and disconnecting me! Good times.

Your site on the HP2000 brings back some of the fondest memories. Our high school was timeshared on old 110 baud modems into one located downtown at the school board building in the basement. It was the first computer I was to ever touch and/or program on. We played StarTrek for hours! I was 17 years old then and am 44 now. That was back in 1977.

We did something fairly unique with it to our school system. We wrote a program called STEAL. It mimicked the logoff sequence, the one everyone used to hit the break button during so the phone line would stay up as a courtesy. It looked something like:

015 minutes terminal time
090 minutes total time

But the break would make it look like:

015 minutes terminal time
090 minu/
READY

Then someone would type:

HEL-B224,QT

That was the HELLO (HEL) B was for East High School and 224 was me as was 150. 40 and 10 sector numbers respectively. But with the steal program they would be typing their access code into what was really a program mimicking the HP2000. It would write the code and control characters into a file and then go into an infinite loop. The break key was disabled with a 10 A=BRK(0) at the beginning of the program. We had to do it. Timeshared accounts run out of time very quickly if you really like computers. There were no microcomputers back then. We used the 'dumb' terminals to 'hack' the University IBM 360/370 Virtual Machine. We got into trouble on that one using $40,000.00 in computer time apparently they charge the students by the second to use it and the threat of arrests. We burned all of our references to that one and nothing ever happened. Just as well, they cut the phone line to the IBM 360/370 that we used. We got the HP2000 B000 group code but as far as I can remember we were unable to hack the A000. It was all very innocent back then. We just wanted more time.

Hope you find your HP2000 and thanks for the memories.

I ran into your site about the HP 2000 and found it very exciting. It answered many questions I've had over the years. One question that would be nice to know was how much one these systems cost back in the 70's.

I started working with a 2000 in about 1971 in my junior high in Minnesota through TIES. I remember touring TIES and thinking how cool it was. They also had 2 Burroughs systems which we accessed through mark-sense cards, which was a real pain. I was lucky enough to get a summer job as a student programmer for H-P at a workshop in Minnesota, working with other students around the country, helping non-computer literate college professors develop software for HP 2000's. Then I got hired by TIES and the Minnesota council on quality education to evaluate software. Then I went to college in 1974 and evaluated software for the HP 3000 at my university. I also got to work on some really old unit record equipment and an ibm 1620 that they had. I just loved the old computers! Living in Minnesota I was able to tour many companies like 3M and Control Data - it was pretty amazing watching memory core being strung together.

I still have tons of programming manuals and paper tapes for the hp2000s. I'm glad to hear that people are trying to get them up and running again. it would really be cool to see one again . . .

Keep up the good work.

Roger
Minnesota

The EDP Resource Center was a computer center dedicated to providing students with computer access (as opposed to the IBM 370 at the central office).

The system had 32 ports running Time Shared Basic. 16 of those ports were dedicated to the EDP Resource Center terminal room at Woodrow Wilson High School. The other 16 ports were part of a dial-in back that permitted other schools in the district to dial in to the computer and make use of it.

Accounts on the system were available to anyone writing programs.

The system provided the following services:

• CAI - Computer Assissted Instruction (primarily math drills)
• CMI - Computer Managed Instruction
• Career Planning (There was a program called "Career" that would ask students questions and based on those questions suggesst possible careers that they might want more information about.)
• Programmming Classes - Students would be taught computer programming
• Computer Operation - Students would be taught operations (the student operators went though this course).
• Computer Games - Students could play games on the computer during lunch and after school.

The EDP Resource Center also had a number of Hollorith Card machines including keypunch, a sorter, and an accounting machine. These were used to teach keypunch, as well as a Saturday class for the Regional Occupational Program (ROP) to help students get into the computer industry. After taking the ROP class, I never had to wait for a keypunch machine again. If I walked into a keypunch room at college, and all of the working machines were in use, I just chose one of the non-working machines at random, unjammed it, and started working.

The Person in charge of the EDP Resouce Center was Eugene Muscat. Last heard he was over at USF (University of San Francisco). They had a sister computer center with a similar type of machine and the two staffs talked a lot.

In the early to mid '70s I had responsibility for an HP 2000C, C', F then Access system as we migrated. We went from the first system with a fixed head drum in a helium environment with 7900 disk drives to 7905, etc.

I was at Tuskegee Institute then and am putting together an early history of computing there which began in the early 60's. I've attached one of the photos I'll be using when the work is complete.

Some things you do not see - above the second processor, you can see the base of a card reader. We wrote programs to grade exams using an exam card we designed. To the far right in the data communications rack, there was a Milgo 2400 baud synchronous modem that connected this system to an IBM 370 at Auburn University for remote job processing where appropriate.

The "Static Ring" you see pointed to was one of the lifting rings in the top of the frame. The center was extremely dry in winter and static electricity was an issue. If you touched the front panel with out discharging yourself and an arc occurred to the panel, it could cause a system fault. The edict went out that anyone getting ready to use the front panes MUST hold on to the static ring. the system was grounded very well and a discharge to the frame was not an issue.

The panel on the far right under the processor was an IO Extender.

If you have an questions, I'll do my best. When I left Tuskegee at the end of '76, I went to work for Hewlett-Packard until retirement, May 2000.

www.gofws.com/fotoz   Our first computer

Fred Stone

I had a complete set of manuals that were borrowed from my by a graduate student when I was in college and I'm sorry to say she and my manuals disappeared. I still have a "Quick Reference to HP 2000 C/F Time-shared BASIC" that I got by writing a letter to Hewlett Packard. Let me know if you would like me to scan it and send it to you for the web site.

Does anyone remember a book called 101 BASIC Computer Games by David Ahl. I think we loaded a lot of these games onto the old 2000. I believe it was published in 1974. I have a copy around here somewhere but it is in far from pristine condition.

Eric Soll

I believe my interest in computers began before I was even born. My father worked for a subcontractor to operate the Univac Serial number 7 installed at Wright Patterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio. He took my mother, who was pregnant with me at the time, to see that monster. As you can imagine, that must have impressed her greatly.

Later, in grade school, when other children were getting books about dogs, horses, and other children's topics from our school library, I was looking for books on computers. I learned about the binary numbering system before learning Algebra.

As a Freshman in high school, circa 1973, I found the computer room where two ASR 33 Teletypes lived, one of which was connected through an acoustical 110 baud modem to an HP 2000c computer owned by MDECA in Dayton.

This was a well-guarded resource that students couldn't touch unless they were taking the one and only computer course offered by the school! I did get to play a few games like BAGELS, but never had access long enough to do more than print the instructions for games like Star Trek.

Fortunately for me, my Algebra teacher was "enlightened" enough to teach a section on BASIC programming. My project was to write an interactive program that would compute common denominators for two input numbers. I remember my first attempt was to automate the manual method I had been taught, but couldn't get it to work because computer time was so limited and my experience so little. At the eleventh hour, I shifted gears, and came up with a brute force algorithm that I was able to finish in the time I had remaining for the assignment.

I eventually took that computer course, much later, and aced it.

I have been programming computers ever since.

I wish I had more time back then on that HP 2000c.

James Larson
In God We Trust.

P.S. I was reading through the HP 2000 MEMORIES page when I found a request from Eric Soll aking if anyone remembers the 101 BASIC Computer Games by David Ahl. Yes, I remember that book, and own a copy. I also found a scanned version of it on the Internet under http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/

Enjoy!

I attended Chesterfield County Public Schools from 1968-1977. Five area school systems banded together to purchase an HP2000 system using federal Title III grant money.

This was administered by Dr Gilpin Brown of the Mathematics and Science Center in Glen Allen, Virginia.

I had my first exposure to the HP2000 when passing a classroom where a group of older male students were huddled around a Teletype ASR-33. My curiosity was piqued, and it turned out that they were playing golf.

I was totally fascinated by the whole setup - the smell of the oiled paper tape, the mechanical process taking place inside of the Teletype, and the amazing way the terminal would spring to life as soon as the RETURN key was pressed. The design and workmanship of the Teletype was the same as the Western Electric telephones of the era, and very impressive to me.

There was quite a pecking order involved in even gaining access to the machine, and it was only through the intervention of the math department head, Mr. Taylor, that I was finally allowed access. The Math-Science center offered Saturday morning programming classes for selected students who wanted to learn, and we were picked up and bussed to the center where we actually got to see the HP2000, and it's imposing Teletype Model 40 - a behemoth which looked like the front end of a '48 Buick.

I devoured all of the classes offered, even staying late nights at my school writing complex programs. I developed a random access database management system and what was called 'interterminal communications' - or a chat as we know it now. The "A" accounts (A000 through A999) were able to share the opening of disk files at the same time between multiple users, and we used this to create our chat program.

There was an intense rivalry between students at my school as well as between schools to see who the best programmer was. By my junior year I had taken all of the classes offered, and had even begun irritating the instructor by correcting her mistakes in front of the other students. Therefore, Mr. Taylor asked if I would like to teach the class, and I agreed.

My logic was that everyone knew the rules of games and liked to play them, so the assignments were the programming of games. First, how to simulate the generation and shuffling of a deck of cards. Then the roll of dice. A roulette wheel, blackjack, bowling, darts and Monopoly soon followed.

I spent weeks and weeks writing a program to play poker. When it was 'finished' the game was actually boring. I rewrote it to cheat 70% of the time, and it became much more challenging and entertaining!

I did all of this development based on what I considered the most logical approach, and was amazed when, years later, when taking college level courses, my instructors were teaching me the structured programming and data access methodologies I had developed completely on my own in high school.

Dr. Brown, the system administrator, was used to the various students playing pranks and setting up logic bombs. We guessed that Z999, which housed the HELLO program that ran for every user upon signing on (displaying date, time and message of the day), had no password.

We reprogrammed HELLO to disable the break key and send infinite page feeds (control-L). Whennext logging on, everyone's Teletypes began spewing paper, so Dr. Brown had to do a system restore to fix the problem.

His user account, A009, had a vast collection of games that were not in the public library.

He would travel to the various schools with a portable terminal that connected to a TV monitor so that he could give demonstrations to the students.

Our school was one of the few to have more than one Teletype and more than one phone line. We had three phone lines, one of which had an extension in the school library.

One of the Teletypes was on rollers, so that a student could roll it into the library and work in one of the listening booths where the other phone extension was located.

Dr. Brown was scheduled to give a presentation in the main computer lab, so I wheeled the mobile Teletype to the listening booth and connected it to the extension that he was using to demonstrate to the group in the lab.

I waited for him to pick up the phone, then I placed my phone on the acoustic coupler and turned on the paper tape punch. I was hoping he would log into his A009 account so that I could decode his password at my leisure.

The Teletype began printing (and punching) everything he was typing, and he did log in to A009, followed (to my surprise) in to A000!

I wrote a program to translate the control characters into visible characters, and my buddies at the other schools and I went on an account-creation rampage.

Dr. Brown had never written or divulged the password to any living soul, so imagine his surprise six weeks later when he was at the system console and the A000 account logged in from 'in the field'.

Like a scene from 1984, within minutes, the loudspeaker in the classroom was barking "BRYAN BRODIE COME TO THE OFFICE IMMEDIATELY."

I was rather dismayed to learn that he had called two other schools first, to see if those students were the ones logged in. I felt that I was the master, and that he could have at least called me first!

He demanded to know how I had gotten the password, and I resisted at first, until he said, "If you don't tell me, I'll give you a user account with no terminal time and no disk space!"

I think he was impressed with my ingenuity as I was not punished and allowed to keep my A300 'group user' ID and teaching position.

I was dyslexic with mathematics, and by learing BASIC programming was able to overcome my fear of numbers and begin a career in Information Technology (called Data Processing back then) which continues to the present day.

I would love to see an emulator of the HP2000 and HP3000 BASIC time sharing systems running on Macs or PCs . it was a real blast to play with those systems.

A dream come true would be to have an old surplus HP2000/3000 to play with as well.

Thanks,

Bryan Brodie

Dan,

I found your site today, and what memories! The program that Jason Brady wrote about, TALKER was written by a team of three people.

I wrote most of the base code for the program during a two week period that I was suspended from using the computer terminal at my high school. I was kicked off the terminals for writing a three line routine that would fill all available records of a user account with dummy 1-record files.

Two other students assisted me with specific routines in the program-- Michael Evans, who wrote some outstanding boolean routines to perform string truncation; and Mike Bartley, who debugged my really bad message purge routine.

I still have the source for TALKER somewhere, I'll have to scan it and send it along to you so that you can compare it to some of the earlier programs of it's genre.

Thanks for the memories,
Steve Hodges

I'm pretty sure I have a box somewhere with lots of code listings, and perhaps even a mag tape dump of the entire system. I'll have to go through my garage and see if I can fish any of it out.

Since the system was re-booted via tape, it would take approx 30 minutes to bring the system back up again, we then had a "race" to see if we could reduce the program down - one of my other classmates got it down to about 1-1/2 pages, I therefor reduced it down to just 5 lines.

We would then run the program and watch in amazement as all the other terminals in the entire classroom would go "dead", then wait 29-31 minutes for the system to come back up again - and then you can guess what we did, run it again!

Dave had decided this was a "bad thing" and wrote a letter to HP, telling them of the problem - a year or two went by, and HP wrote him back saying "Take this line of code out of your program, and it won't do that anymore"...... after a while, it just wasn't "fun" anymore - so we stopped doing it.

The program was very simple, it would open up a file - and then do a MAT READ(0/0).

When HP BASIC ever got a number it could not handle, it would convert that number to the biggest number it could express, I guess the MAT READ function never did a bounds check on the index and it would cause the system to start reading somewhere it wasn't supposed to.

Update:

Hello Sir,

I first learned HP2000C Basic on a ASR/33 TELETYPE at OMSI back in 1968, and then I was "HOOKED", in fact - it changed my life completely

Prior to that, I had no interest in school at all - grades were horrible, but then coming into 7th grade at Sellwood grade school - I found a ASR/33 with built-in modem at school; I even remember the phone number: 255-8020.

Within a few months, I was programming at a high-school level; had access to Benson high school's account and when I started going to Benson, I was averaging 3 hrs a day in front of the terminal - writing games, and even my own language.

One of my school-mates had a 11-page program that would accidently take the ENTIRE school district down! Another friend of mine reduced it to 2 pages, and then I reduced it to 4 lines !

10 files temp
20 dim a(100)
30 mat read #1;a(0/0 min 1)
40 end

It would give an error and then the entire system would crash, and take the person 30 minutes to recover it from tapes.

Benson High School 1972-1975

Back in 1979, the HP2000 running TSB was one of the first "mainframes" I was exposed to. As a new School of Business student at USC, I would be required to use the business school's mainframe to solve some homework problems. The mainframe was located in an on-campus building then known as the Keck Center, in the business school. The Keck center featured CRT terminals that were directly connected to the HP2000. In addition, there were DECwriter (by Digital Equipment Corporation) printing terminals, each with its own dial telephone and Anderson-Jacobson acoustic coupler modem. You could dial an extension and be connected to the HP2000, or (for those of us who were mischievous) defeat the school's Centrex PBX system and dial a modem anywhere in the world.

A few of us spent our days in the Keck Center. A fellow business student wrote a simulation (game) called KOMKYP, in which the goal was to steal money from the bank. I wrote a login simulator, to capture the system operator's password as he logged into the system using the "A000" account. After capturing his password, I invited my friend Kevin Mitnick to join me there. He was not enrolled at the school - he was simply my guest. Together, we explored not only the HP2000 and its capabilities, but also the capabilities of systems which were within the reach of the school's acoustic modem.

Regards,
Lewis De Payne

I recall reading the manual so often that I memorized most of the language, even parts I didn't understand how to apply. I recall being in math class and learning about matrix operations and finally realized what all those DIM and MAT functions were for. I couldn't wait to get to the computer that afternoon and whip up a small program using BASIC MAT functions to get the results the teacher got when doing examples in class.

As a ham radio person and electronics hobbyist I already knew the name HP for oscilloscopes and test equipment, and even had some old versions of those that others gave to me.

Anyway, I hope you like this addition to your memories page.