HP 64000

= HP Series 64000 =

The HP 64000, introduced circa 1980, is a tool for developing hardware and software for products based on commercial microcomputers. The earliest commercial 64000 development systems contain from one to six 64100A Development Stations sharing a hard drive and line printer. This arrangement allowed up to six designers and engineers to use their workstations together, sharing the HPIB instrumentation bus and a hard drive and a line printer. This was an innovative feature of the 64000 development system since other systems of the era used a timesharing system with a single system processor and memory, making for a more expensive and less flexible development system.

Description

The 64000 system is a complete emulation system consisting of a microprocessor emulator, a memory emulator, a logic analyzer, and a software package that interacts with the integrated hardware to form a complete development tool. [http://www.hparchive.com/Journals/Low-Resolution/HPJ-1980-10-Low-Resolution.pdf HP Journal, October 1980] in PDF format.]

The three interfaces that comprise a 64000 system are as follows:

# the user interface as defined by the target processor's specifications.
# the high-speed emulation bus that connects the processor emulator, the memory emulator, and the logic analyzer.
# the 64100A mainframe bus is used to control the emulation processor and to communicate between the mainframe processor and the emulation processor.

Examine the functional diagram of the HP 64000 system to the right which illustrates the interaction between various system components.

Microprocessor Emulator

The emulation systems available consists of two subsytems, 1) an external emulation pod which contains the target microprocessor and 2) an internal expansion card called the emulation control board which controls the microprocessor in the pod and interfaces it to the system timing and control signals of the 64100A workstation.

Emulator Pods

These are pods external to the 64100A and 64110 mainframe. The pod is connected to a matching control board in the card cage by 2 sometimes 3 flat cables. It may also be connected to a target computer system's processors socket by a 40-pin plug for 8 bit processors or a 64 pin plugin for processors like the 68000 or 68010 64 pin dip socket.

The following is a list of available emulator pods for various target microprocessor systems.

References

External links

* [http://bitsavers.org/pdf/hp/64000/ PDF documentation for HP 64000] from [http://bitsavers.org Bitsavers]