All models came standard with a 5.25-inch floppy disc drive, at least 512K RAM and a 4-slot backplane. Most units shipped with the built in optional 10 MB hard disc and internal thermal printer. These machines could be expanded with additional memory and additional CPUs. The top-of-the range 9020T included the color monitor, hard disc, 1 MB RAM, printer, BASIC, HP-UX, Fortran and Pascal for only $65,585.

In July of 1983, HP's Boeblingen Computer Products Division introduced a detachable keyboard option (G02, $600) for the 9020.

The 1000/A900 and 9000/500 Series computers were so fast, they were bound by special US government export restrictions. Automatic export approval was given for only 16 countries. Export to any other country required an individual license.

The 9020 workstation was also the heaviest ever made by HP. These computers weighed between 55 and 74 Kg depending on configuration.

Collector's Notes:

The museum's 9020 has been an interesting challenge. Our unit has the built-in hard disc with BASIC installed. We copied the contents to an external drive (7958) in SDF format. Most other HP computers will not perform file functions (eg CAT or COPY) on SDF discs. So, we also copied the dontents of the internal drive in LIF format. LIF does not accept files with names longer than 10 characters. So, a number of files from our 9020 did not copy over. We manually copied some of the files over one at a time by reducing the length of the file names. But, we didn't get them all. Unfortunately, the system files for the 9020 do not appear when a CAT command is sued. These files are hidden. We were unable to boot our 9020 from the external hard disc onto which the files had been copied.

In the meantime, we ran a utility on the 9020 named BOOT_TO_FILE. We have no documentation on the utility, but the screen says that it will write the operating system from your hard disc to a file that you name. We succeeded in writing our 9020's system to an external file (SDF format. It won't write to a LIF disc). The file that was created is a DATA file. We moved the file to an external hard disc and tried to boot from it but without success. Another step must be required to make a bootable system from the DATA file. During this process, we learned that the 9020 will work with a 9122C and write to HD floppy discs (the hardware support matrix we have notes the 9122C as untested). We have successfully archived the DATA file that we created when we ran the BOOT_TO_FILE utility.

In our continuing effort to archive workable system software, we ran another utility that we found on our 9020 named MARK_BOOT (also with no documentation). The screen for this utility says that it will look at connected discs for installed operating systems and allow the user to mark those operating systems as "loadable" or "unloadable". When we ran this utility, it automatically marked the operating system on our 9020's internal disc as "unloadable". Between projects, we powered our 9020 down before running the utility again to mark our internal disc O/S as "loadable". Unfortunately, our 9020 would not boot from its internal disc when we powered it back up.

Naturally, we would love to hear from you if you have any ideas on how we might be able to get our 9020 to boot again (and especially if you have any original system software).