HP Integral PC

Hardware

The Integral PC is a mains-powered portable computer with a 9-inch amber electroluminescent display with a resolution of 512×255 pixels or 80×25 characters (the 256th line of the display is not used). It also incorporated a 710 kB 3.5" floppy disk drive and an HP ThinkJet ink-jet printer. Standard memory capacity was 256 KB ROM plus 512 KB RAM, expandable to 7.5 MB. Expansion slots and an HP-IB bus were also included. The mechanical design was based on the ideas of the de facto standard HP-85.

Within the Integral PC CPU, RAM, ROM, memory management, I/O buffering, system timing and keyboard interface are integrated on a single logic-board. All peripheral units and the 14 connections are built using independent boards. Each board is smaller than a letter sized sheet. To make it easier to check the boards, each board contains an own timer. The I/O-board (with two connections for optional addons), the keyboard-interface, the "Human Interface Link" HP-HIL and the power supply can be checked and tested independently.

The graphics processor of the Integral PC (GPU) was custom made and could drive an electroluminescence display or nearly every kind of monitor. The processor provides a graphical subsystem which is simple to use to drive a bitmapped display (32 KB display memory). The GPU is able to draw lines, rectangles and alphanumerical characters by hardware. Additionally it provides a hardware cursor and the display-RAM-interface.

The electroluminescence-display was based on thin-film-technique developed by HP and other companies.