I had an HP85 computer hooked up to a spectrum analyser in 1978, and GPIB was certainly well established and supported by most instrument vendors by then, so I would guess that it has been around since at least the early 1970s. HP invented the standard as HP-IB and it was later adopted as IEEE 488, which is a published standard.
What a good idea!
Casper,
Many have stated what it is, and how long it has been around, so there is no need for me to state that.
What has not been stated is that it is still in common use on modern (i.e. sold today) test equipment. On expensive equipment it will be standard, on cheaper stuff usually an option, and on the very cheapest test kit you will not find it.
You will not find it on a sub $100 digital volt meter, but it will be pretty standard on a $1000 bench DVM for lab use.
It is in fact similar in many ways to SCSI
1) It has been around for ages. 2) Still very common. 3) Parallel bus 4) Multiple devices on the same bus 5) Each device has a unique address. 6) Just add cables to add another instrument. 7) There are limits of distance and number of instruments. 8) You can get extenders.And GPIB boards are sold this day new of course.
So Sun supporting it might not be a bad idea.
PS, I am still looking for the drivers for Solaris, for my home Sun on a home project to look at the drift of an quartz oscillator relative to a rubidium standard, using an HP time-interval counter, so if anyone is able to help, get in touch at:
daved DOT kirkby AT onetel DOT net
Somehow this jogged my memory, and I remember a Centronics connector - like a parallel printer, but not as big. So, before making a public fool of myself, I looked them up:
Oh, well, different number of pins. :-) And HPIB, of course, can piggyback for daisy-chains. (I saw a training video once at Control Data, where the lecturer mentioned daisy-chaining, and noted "Nobody really wants to talk about where that particular term came from...")
Cheers! Rich
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