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HP 700/96 Terminal - Getting into the Setup Menu

nullvalue

nullvalue

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Hello, I have just obtained a HP 700/96 terminal + keyboard which is in very good condition. It powers on, and I was able to reset to defaults by holding the "D" key at boot. However, I can't seem to get into the Setup menu. I couldn't find the PDF of a manual for this specific terminal, but a manual for a similar device basically just says to press the Setup key on the keyboard. I've done that but nothing happens but the standard keypress tone. I can type into the terminal and text goes across the first line but I don't get anything from my plugged in device. I have a standard serial DCE device plugged in which has been tested and works. It was tested with both a PC and an old ADDS ViewPoint terminal. Tried port 1 and port 3 on the HP, at both 19,200 and 9600 baud set on the device. Without the ability to get into the setup menu, my options are kind of limited. Any thoughts?
 
Chuck(G) said:
See chapter 2 on unlocking the configuration. Your terminal seems to have its configuration locked.
Click to expand...

Chuck, thank you - do you think I need to have a device send that unlock escape sequence? or can I do it from the keyboard?
 
Maybe I'm not understanding the manual.. So it gives an example:

LocalEcho = No: Ec&k 0L

So at the keyboard, do I enter the following keys? <ESC>,&,k,0,L

If so, I'm not having much luck. I also notice I can't enter any capital letters.. the manual seems to indicate capitalization is important, but neither holding the shift key or pressing CAPS makes a difference. I wonder if I've got the wrong HP keyboard for this terminal?
 
Apparently there are two different keyboards.. C3341 and the much rarer C3340 - I think I have the C3341 and am going to be sent a C3340 for testing. Fingers crossed!
 
Chuck(G) said:
Something's fishy for certain.
Click to expand...

Ok I got the machine-correct keyboard and things are working much better now. I can get into the menus and function keys work the way they're supposed to. However I still can't get anything to display at the terminal. There are 2 serial ports on the back (one DB25 and a DB9) - plus a parallel port for a printer. I've tried both serial ports. I've set the baud rate/ports correctly as far as I know. I am using an arduino-based serial device. I can plug it into the back of an ADDS ViewPoint terminal and bi-directional communication "just works". However this HP terminal is obviously a lot more complicated. I'm not really sure what I need to do to enable simple serial communications. I am using a straight serial cable with a normal DB9/DB25 adapter (the same setup that works with the viewpoint). Here are my settings.. anything you can think of?

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I swear I had tried that but must not have had the right combination of configs at the time. Making sure REMOTE mode was on fixed it. Thank you!
 
This terminal hails from the day when terminals were used to perform real work, mostly by presenting forms for filling-in. Very early CPT word-processing systems used this sort of setup--a page of text was shot out to a terminal, which was edited offline, then send as a block back to the CPU.
"Fill in the blanks" type of operations also used the facility.
 
Yeah I had no idea these "dumb" terminals actually had that much smarts going on! Must have saved a lot in bandwidth/CPU usage by not having to send every ASCII character for form draws, etc. Pretty cool!
 
It was mostly a matter of line speed and CPU time slice availability. This is not a "dumb" terminal. A teletype would be a dumb terminal, CRT-based terminals that emulated this behavior were often called "glass TTYs". Some didn't get much beyond recognizing carriage-return linefeed sequences.
 
A lot of the terminals could do this kind of block mode form thing. But if you grew up in the UNIX world, you'd almost never see it.

I don't know what systems leveraged that facility. I remember playing with it on one of our systems, but it wasn't worth the effort.

WANG used to have a "fill in the screen" kind of interface, but I left that soon after we got it. (No idea who/why they bought that thing, honestly.)

Biggest problem with these kinds of forms is there's no feedback, it's basically like a modern web form, with no interactive features. Fill it in, hit SUBMIT, hope you got it right.
 
Lots of public record keeping (e.g. DMV) was initially done this way. It could make a little bit of CPU power go a long way. The system could put up a form with fields filled in and the guy with the terminal could edit the form and send it back. It worked well.
 
MPE-V on the HP 3000 systems used block mode for a number of apllications: database, editing, etc. The older 264X and 262X terminals supported block mode, as well as the 2382A, 2392A, and 700/92 and 700/94 terminals. Offline editing in block mode meant more interactive users could be supported.
 
Lots of vendors in the 70s offered block-mode terminals. Beehive, for example. I used to use block mode as a text editor on my Altair 8800. I miss that SuperBee, even though I wouldn't know what to do with it today.
 
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