Poking at the HP-150 again because it has problems reading floppy disks. This is basically the first ever 3.5” floppy mechanism- it’s not even double sided! I managed to find an extra on eBay for not too much money, amazingly. When putting it in it’s totally dead so it’ll have to serve as a parts drive.
Amazingly I figured out how to get the original drive working - there’s a solenoid that holds the pressure pad off the surface of the disk until it’s being accessed. It gets stuck in the up position but tapping it with a finger gets the disk to read! I finally am able to read this disk that I’ve carted around for decades! This is a pretty early disk with an oval window and locking shutter (you squeeze the corner of the disk to release it).
The disk seems to be unarchived but it’s not very useful on its own, since its disk B in a set of 2. I found a listing online by someone who says they have disk A, but imaging it failed.
@polpo@bitbang.socialNext step was seeing if the drive can read disks created from images on the HP Museum. After messing around far too long with drive images that I didn’t realize were double sided, I finally wrote a working disk. Here’s #Zork III on the HP-150, one of the few games ever made for this computer.
Time to play with #AutoCAD, which amazingly was ported to this machine. It takes a couple minutes to load any drawing of reasonable complexity. Redrawing is relatively quick though!
This version of #AutoCAD amazingly has 3D. This office drawing took about 5 minutes to load and draw. I bet running the “remove hidden lines” command would take about an hour.
That’s version 4 right? I used that with a hooded monochrome monitor in the first CAD training…
@polpo Amazes me how the tech has progressed. (I'm writing this while watching a 4k video streaming over the Internet which requires so much more processing power than rendering that cad drawing... ) Also this classic tech has so much charm!
@polpo You need a pen plotter now 
@paulrickards next up is plotting from this with my HP 7470A with HPIB! 
@polpo coooool.
What year (roughly) is this Version from?
@polpo 
i wonder if that implies that the z-machine interpreter could be snipped out of the executable, and load any infocom game?
@vga256 ooh, I bet!