The cables I have do not look like the Wikipedia page picture; they have
matte
metal shells with black screws rather than black
shells with
metallic-appearing
screws. The Wikipedia page does say that the
connectors "are held in
place by
screws, either UTS (now largely
obsolete) or metric M3.5?0.6 threads. By convention, metric screws are
colored
black, as the two threads do not mate.". I
suspect the cables will work
fine
except for possible mechanical retention issues if the
screws are wrong -
in my
experience they have notably low friction.
There are different version of the HP-IB cables sold by HP, some have molded
connectors others have metal connector.
Some cables are shielded heavily others have a less thick shielding, the
standard instrumentation HP-IB bus has a transfer rate from 250-500kB/s.
Later they developed the High speed HP-IB bus for data transport between
computers and peripherals, this bus is terminated and has a transfer rate
of 5MB/s.
The cabling for the high-speed bus is better shielded and twisted then the
earlier cables (molded ones), the HS cables are also thicker.
And at some point EMI radiation also became a point of interest, and had his
influence at the cable.
In most cases you can use all version cables for both applications, only
when using long cables for discs etc. you need to use the thick version
otherwise you will get transport errors.
And the HP 1000 A-series (may be also the 3000 but I don't have those)
controllers are a little picky about the cables you use, they try to get the
maximum transfer rate and depend heavily on the cable characteristics .
I looked at my box of cables and it looked as though
they were all
HP-branded
and marked 10833A, in case that helps; I didn't go
through them carefully
checking each one, but that is how all the cable ends in easy view were
marked.
I would need a cable with male connectors on both
ends.
The Wikipedia page also says
One unusual feature of IEEE-488 connectors is they commonly use a
"double-headed" design, with male on one side, and female on the
other. This allows stacking connectors for easy daisy-chaining.
I think all my cables match this description.
Should be, single ended connectors are rare, I only have two of them and
they belonged to the bus-analyzer.
-Rik