The all-in-one HP 9826 computer was the successor of the 9825. It was the transition machine between the calculators/computers 9800 family and the HP-9000-200 desktop computer series. As it belonged to both the families, it was also called HP 9000-236
It was a robust and compact 6800-based machine which featured a 7" monochrome display, a complete keyboard (including first use of soft-keys and the scroll wheel at leftand), a 264 KB, 5.25" floppy-disk drive. On the rear panel, one also found one HP-IB port and 8 expansion slots.
Like the 9825, it ran HPL, but could also run BASIC and Pascal. The Basic interpreter was developped by HP and was also known as "Rocky Mountain BASIC", or RMB. This version would evolve into the HP-BASIC for the series-300 and HP-UX machines.
The 9826 was choosen and intensively used by the Walt Disney studios for "Tron", the first movie that used a computer to control all the processes implemented during the shoot, from camera adjustments to graphic and text superimpositions.
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They were 68000, or possibly 68010, not 6800. I was in the same classes as David BTW - long time no see! Nice little machines, for the time.
Monday 29th July 2019
Jon Leech (USA)
The HP-9826 was a screamingly fast and powerful machine for its time. It was much better than the IBM PC with twice the clock speed and a 16 bit bus, an external hard drive, a digitizing tablet, and 2 MB of RAM. That entire package I''m sure cost over $10000.
I used one in Jim Blinn''s CS286 computer graphics course at Caltech with an external 16 color monitor (Barco) for rendering. The programming language was Pascal.
We called them "chipmunks". I thought that was just a cute nickname but I recently read that was the internal HP codename for the machine.
I spent hundreds of hours cooped up in a room with them completing a program that was used to design integrated circuits.
