| Developer: | Hewlett-Packard |
| Type: | Desktop computer |
| Released: | 1980 |
| Discontinued: | 1984 (being outcompeted by the [1] |
| Processor: | Standard option 1xx: 2 x 16-bit ([2] PPU) 3-chip hybrid processor with BPC, IOC and EMC Enhanced option 2xx: 1 x bit-slice processor (LPU) 1 x 16-bit hybrid (PPU) @ |
| Memory: | 64 - 1600 KB RAM |
| Power: | Mainframe: |
| Price: | US$39,500 [3] |
| Weight: | 48.1kg (106lb) |
The HP 9845C from Hewlett-Packard was one of the first desktop computers to be equipped with a color display and light pen for design and illustration work. It was used to create the color war room graphics in the 1983 movie WarGames.[4] [5]
The attached HP 98770A color display enabled the color graphics with its own CPU and separate power supply, a vector generator based on the AMD2900 bit-slice architecture, graphics memory with three planes of each, the connection interface to the mainframe consists of a direct data bus attachment, and a light-pen logic.[3] were available.[3]
The system is a big-endian 16-bit architecture, the BPC, with roots in the HP 2116A which were one of the first 16-bit microprocessors created.[6]
The display showed 8 soft keys on the lower end of the screen, 39 alignment controllers behind a door enabled fine tuning of color convergence.[3]
The speed of the builtin BASIC language was accomplished by implementing time critical parts of it in CPU microcode.[3]
A builtin tape cartridge device with a capacity of 217 kB and transfer speed of 1440 bytes/s enabled storage of data.[3] Average access time for the unit is 6s and a rewind end to end takes 20s. The directory is stored in r/w memory to enable quick access.[7]
| For/Next | ~95 | ~145 | |
| Matrix Plot | ~200 | ~240 | |
| Absolute Plot | ~5 000 | ~5 000 | |
| Circles/s not clipped | ~2 | ~5 |