Semi OT: vintage word processing

That may be but it doesn't change the fact that it's terrible.

At the time it was invented it was really quite good. HP even used it to connect their external hard disks. The handshaking meant that you knew all devices had seen the commands and data (but also that things ran so that the slowest device set the workable transfer speed). ISTR Good for

The main alternative for instrumentation was poxy RS232 speeds 9600baud =1kbyte/s and the risk of buffer overrun (remember those?).

It is still used in some places there is a lot of GPIB kit still out there and the connectors were virtually indestructible (although they didn't tolerate metallic swarf or strong acids very well).

I had a couple of those, a 9826 and a 9816 with a math coprocessor board an d a Rocky Mountain Basic-compatible compiler (from some outfit called Infot ek iirc). I still have a couple of instruments that have Instrument Basic i nstalled and so can control other ones.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I'm still using mid-80s SCSI-1 with some stuff because...reasons.

The cables are more expensive than the PC adapter cards.

It was flaky as all hell. Sometimes it demanded to be a star configuration (I had 8 488 connectors stacked on some equipment) and sometimes *had* to be daisy-chained. Sometimes something between. What an ungodly mess, particularly when there was more than one manufacturer of equipment in the string. No, it was complete s**te!

There were line length limitations and only a fool would stack connectors more than three or four deep on one unit. No-one could ever call them pretty but they did the job. The worst connector I have ever seen was a Belgacom phone plug which looked more like it was designed for 3 phase mains than anything else.

I never had any problems with it and we made full implementation system controllers. There were flakey partial implementations by some instrument manufacturers but if you avoided the cowboys it was generally very reliable. You could even break the rules a little bit if you didn't want absolutely maximum speed (back then very few devices could actually send bulk data at 1MB/s like frame stores and transient recorders).

I remember those (fairly) well. At Granger Assoc in 1981(?), I was designing parts of a 900MHz radio system. For production test, we bought an HP8953XT RF test system consisting of a 5 ft rack full of HP-IB connected RF instruments, with an HP8954A programmable interface[1]. The computer that ran it was a Model 200 series HP9816 with HP-IB connected HP9121 dual 3.5" floppy drive. It was the first

I didn't get to play with the computer beyond getting the RF stuff interfaced and running. Suffice to say that we never had any problems with the system that could be attributed to HP-IB, except for one defective HP-IB connector, that easily repaired. We had plenty of problems with the instruments and in particular, the HP8954A interface box, the HP-IB stuff worked as expected. Of course, this was an all HP system. I would expect more entertainment from a mix of equipment from different vendors.

Then only a fool could get the POS to work. That was the *ONLY* configuration that worked!

If you had days and days to f*ck around with it and could then leave it alone forever. Maybe.

That's exactly what I was doing but they had their own 488 bus. It was the power supplies and volt meters that were really picky. I'm