Gecko or the HP 712/60


My Gecko, the code name for the HP 712,  runs NeXTSTEP 3.3 Its a neat little machine. It is PA RISC based. That's HP's proprietary RISC architecture processors. Unfortunately the J6xxx were the last PA RISC machines built.

If you are looking for a RISC workstation, and don't want to invest in special monitors or keyboards this is the machine for you. It has a PS/2 mouse and keyboard port as well as a standard VGA port. The internal floppy drive is a standard PC drive. Its easy to find replacements. It has an RJ-45(Cat5 Ethernet) connection as well, so no need for special networking.

The one drawback is that it has a SCSI interface for its mass storage bus. This led to an interesting approach to install NextStep. More on that below. SCSI is pretty common among these types of computers, and older Macintosh's. The main problem is that there is a large variety of SCSI types, and not all are physically compatible with each other. It is also expensive to find new SCSI drives, so the used market is really the on;y place to find them.

The Gecko was designed to be a low cost workstation. To that end it uses simple things to bring the cost down. For example the use of a standard floppy drive meant that it could use some commodity hardware. Couple that with the use of standard PC video and PS/2 input devices, HP was able to drive down the cost. The case also had some interesting cost savings. It had foam mounting devices to hold the HD and floppy drive. It also used a smaller plastic case. The only metal in there, aside from the PC Board traces, was the EM shielding and the power supply box.

Perhaps the most interesting cost savings was done with the LASI chip. This was an ASIC that contained nearly all the on board peripherals in one chip. The parallel port, serial ports, mouse and keyboard controllers were in this chip. Also the SCSI and LAN adapters as well. The real interesting part was it was designed using an HDL, or a special programming language for describing computer hardware. While this is common place today, it was ground breaking back in 1994. HP had a great article on it in the magazine they published. As a matter of fact the April 95 issue is almost exclusively dedicated to the Gecko. 

Many people would disagree that the most interesting part of the computer is the LASI chip. Many people will point to the graphics system. The Artist graphics, as it was called, was an 8 bit system. The interesting part is a technology called Color Recovery. This allowed the computer to reach almost true color. True color is 32 bit on a Windows system, 24 bit every where else. Using special Digital Signal processing techniques the color could be increased to 23 bits.  Only HP-UX and NeXTSTEP have the ability to use this system. Linux is still in the early stages of getting X11 to work, so it has not been able to incorporate Color Recovery  into its drivers.

This  page is a great resource for all the HP workstations.


I do not own a SCSI CD-ROM. This became an issue when I tried to install NeXTSTEP. I do have a SCSI Zip disk and a SCSI Jazz drive. Here is what I had to do.

1) Obtain the NeXTSTEP Risc install disk.
2) Create an ISO image of it : dd if=(cd device) of=next.iso
3) If you have a SCSI bus on a UNIX/Linux machine just attach the Jazz drive or any SCSI drive of at least 500mb, skip to step 11
4) Obtain the Gentoo HP-UX install image. http://lug.mtu.edu/gentoo/experimental/hppa/netboot/netboot-hppa-20050111/
5) Setup a TFTP server. If using a UNIX/Linux machine refer to its documentation to setup a tftp server, if you are using Windows I      used  http://tftpd32.jounin.net/
6) Boot the Gecko stoping it at the boot screen by pressing escape.
7) Type 'search' to have it search for bootable media. It should find the network boot.
8) Boot via network: 'boot lan'
9) Once gentoo has been booted, use fdisk to partition the internal hard drive, mine was set to SCSI ID 6, then make a filesystem
10) Download the ISO from step 2 to the internal hard drive.
11) Copy the ISO to the external drive. dd if=next.iso of=(external hd device)
12) Reboot the machine. 'shutdown -r now'
13) Stop it at the boot screen
14) Type search. Then type boot (value it found for your external harddrive)
15) It should boot the NeXTSTEP install CD.

Kind of convoluted huh? It is much easier if you have a CD Drive. Steps 1 & 14 and 15 are all you need.