HP 300

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The HP 300 "Amigo" was a computer produced by Hewlett Packard (HP) in the late 1970s based loosely on the stack-based HP 3000 but with virtual memory for both code and data. It was a commercial failure—massively so considering the huge engineering effort, which included HP-developed and -manufactured silicon on sapphire processor and I/O chips. The processor board and I/O boards were used in some later HP 3000 systems.

The HP 300 was designed as a single-user workstation by a totally separate program within the General Systems Division, the Cupertino CA home of the HP 3000 business computers. The circuit boards were in a floor pedestal, with CRT and fixed keyboard on top. It pioneered such ideas as built-in networking, automatic spelling correction, multiple windows (on a character based screen), and labels adjacent to vertically stacked user function keys, now used on ATMs and gas pumps. It also featured HP-IB (later IEEE-488) as the I/O bus, an 8" floppy disk, and a fixed 12M hard drive which was considered to be hard to back up.

It had a native system programming language, a database, BASIC, and featured screen editing for RPG.

The HP 250 multi-terminal small business system, developed around the same time in Loveland CO, was based on the desktop computers and saw somewhat better success, especially in Europe.