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HP-85

Revealing testimony from Giubodi: It was the first computer I saw! Very reliable. I remember when the technicians brought it at my father's office. He asked some information about technical assistance, they answered "our machines will never break..." Now it's 2005, and it's still working! Dominique Fillon memories: Many years ago, I saw a numbers of HP85 used by a seismic prospection company, with power re-wired to accept 12V DC from ordinary batteries (on top of the original AC power connector...) The HP85 would then run virtually anywhere, offering outstanding capabilities for topographs to log and records their waypoints out in the jungle, aboard a boat in swamp areas, in the desert, etc... The last time I saw one outdoor, it was in Indonesia, where a man job was to hold a huge umbrella so the HP85 was kept "sort of" dry.... Needless to say, the thermal printer would not work under 100% humidity, but it would work again when back into the jungle camp, after some time under the hair dryer that was a mandatory part of the maintenance engineer kit... These machines were extermely reliable, very rugged and quite easy to program. It took only a few days to use the basic programming that was available from the ROM drawer... From Gizmo: In Italy, there were five HP85-A which were used to monitor the water cooling system of a nuclear plant!