Philip Freidin shows off his HP-85 EBTKS board

This one is for you, HP-80 series lovers . You can now upgrade your HP-85 (and 86 and 87) thanks to Philip's EBTKS add-on board. Foremost, it gives you mass storage emulation: no need to take on the difficult tape drive mechanism restoration, and then having to deal with the finicky and notoriously unreliable tapes. Or acquiring one of the two rare floppy disc units compatible with the 85A. 

But it does so much more! Actually they put so much functionality in it that they ended up calling it the Everything But The Kitchen Sink (EBTKS) board. It actually has a kitchen sink drawing on the back to prove it.

It simply inserts at the back of the HP-85 in one of the normal module slots. No modification to the HP-85, save for disconnecting the tape drive if you want to use the tape drive emulation.

And bingo, this unrestored HP-85 (a donation from viewer Robert Moon), probably fresh of eBay, has now a virtual tape drive and a bunch of disk drives. It's ready for use. You just do CAT and here are your files.

But wait, it also adds all the known existing ROMs and the equivalent of an extended RAM drawer! No need to scour eBay for one of these pesky ROM drawers, and then some more to get all the ROMs! Even the elusive service ROM and assembly ROM are included!

But wait, it also adds 4 brand new ROMs, written by Everett Kazer, the HP engineer that wrote the assembler ROM back in the day. This adds a whole bunch of new words to the BASIC and greatly expands the file system capabilities. What? My HP-85 has now a POSIX-style hierarchical file system? I can use more than 6 characters in a file name?

And there is a ton more stuff, including a virtual printer and even an integrated Logic Analyzer, if you feel brave enough to diagnostic a hardware fault in your HP-85, or if you want to reverse engineering it completely (which is pretty much what Philip and his collaborators did).

Of course I kept my EBTKS board. And Philip got the donated HP-85 for all his good work. Robert, your machine is in good hands!

Marc