Is anyone still using an HP 82321A (an HP 3xx computer on an ISA card) to control their instruments( over HPIB). I'm looking for an ISA equiped computer to host one following the demise of mine. Any suggestions for motherboards known to work are welcome.
Dunno, but there are various HP instruments that come with HP Rocky Mountain Basic installed, and can be the GPIB controller. I have a
35665A that can run all the code I wrote as a grad student in the mid '80s.Of course it doesn't interoperate easily on a modern network, and disk storage is a problem.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
If you're feeling brave there's a USB to ISA adapter:
From my interpretation of the manual the install process builds a custom environment to use on the host x86 to communicate with the interpreter running on the 68000, and a custom binary which gets uploaded to the card RAM and starts executing there when the environment on the DOS machine is executed, not every board had enough RAM stock to support all possible functions:
Seems to me like it doesn't have anything like a BIOS in ROM to boot strap itself, it needs a DOS environment to act as an intermediary to know it's alive and upload the code it's supposed to be running
I'd say drop the HP 82321A and get an Arduino with an onboard Forth interpreter and live the good life. If you want a performance upgrade, one of the CM3 ARM chips would probably quadruple the performance. That would likely not be very noticeable, given the slow performance of the GPIB interface. Heck, anything faster than an 8051 would not likely be noticeable.
Rocky Mountain Basic is an amazingly productive environment for controlling boat anchors, though. The simplicity of the code required depends on a lot of shared assumptions, but BITD it was pretty amazing.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
If you're a cheapskate or want to avoid proprietary software, build an AR488 instead - I used one to back up the calibration from my HP3478A before the battery dies.
Seems like a used PCI 488.2 card and a copy of HT Basic might work for them?
I believe National Instruments has pretty good driver support for legacy hardware, and the HT Basic license is hundreds, not thousands.
I think the big expense for someone starting a big rack of automated HP gear from scratch with a PCI card vs USB converter dongles would be the cables but sounds like OP probably has that sorted
I'll probably just retire it, as ISA equipped machines seem to be priced rather high considering their performance. Incidentally the card does work in a compaq portable like Don's (at least the 486c model so most likely the 286/386 as well) as well as HP's own Vectras.
It's a nice system to have since HP used the 3xx machines internally to test and calibrate a lot of their kit in the 80's and 90's, and they were quite happy to provide their test/calibration software for these 'obsolete' machines upon request until a few years ago. (I'm about to fix/calibrate an HP 4195 hence the initial question.)
As to HP Basic itself I always preferred HP Pascal but that fell by the wayside in the late 80's - the free program EZGPIB is a good alternative (even if not familiar with Pascal it's worth a look). HT Basic costs in the region of £1000 for a license so it's not something I'd personally purchase, if writing new code there are plenty of free alternatives.
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