A development laboratory in Colorado Springs on a clear autumn morning, on a workbench a broad instrument of pale beige-grey with rounded edges, at upper left a small dark screen with a soft green glow, its lower half sloping forward as a keyboard of plain grey and cream-white keys with a square block of sixteen cream keys and a cross of arrow keys, along the bottom a plain smooth gold-brown strip, flat grey ribbon cables running from it to small grey clips on the legs of plain unmarked black chips on a green circuit board, a hand in a blue shirt sleeve at the arrow keys, a window onto snow-capped mountains.
What it was used for
The HP 1611A was a logic state analyzer for troubleshooting systems built around microprocessors. The HP Memory Project says it arrived "with the main purpose of debugging systems that used popular microprocessors of the time" and worked with plug-in personality modules, "each tuned for individual microcode instruction sets for a specific microprocessor", the first of them for Intel's 8080. The same project's instrument list describes it as "Logic State Analyzer for Micropross. Based Systems - For 6800, A68, A80, 0F8, Z80". In the February 1978 HP Journal, Deborah J. Ogden covers adapting the 1611A to the F8 family on page 28.
What was new
What was new was the display. According to the HP Memory Project the 1611A was HP's first instrument with a mnemonic display, showing the microprocessor's instructions instead of strings of "1" and "0", and the firm's first logic state analyzer with keyboard control. In the February 1978 HP Journal, Chuck House recommends "logic analyzers offering assembly-language tracing (e.g., HP 1611A)" to larger development labs. The barb: the display was processor-specific. Change the processor and you needed a new personality module - and the February 1978 issue fills a whole article with the extension to just 1 further family.
What the sources leave open: The HP Memory Project gives two years: its wall page says 1977 for the introduction, its instrument list 1978 with a reference to HP Journal 02/1978; Ogden cites J. H. Smith's article on the 1611A in the January 1977 HP Journal. The specifications with Ogden's article give $5,200 for the 1611A with the F8 option and $1,250 for the 10259A field-installable personality module.