HP-IB Census

Steve Robertson wrote: Steve, I'd say the best use of your time would be to (1) collect the best existing articles on the subjects above and provide an overview and pointers to the articles. ideally all the articles could be hosted by jay so that we don't need to worry about dead links, but if there are copyright issues, perhaps point to the document if it exists online and hold on to a copy in case the link ever goes dead; when that day comes, then spend the time to get approval to post the stashed copy (2) if any of the topics above doesn't have a good existing document, then think about writing one. a good summary for each is also very useful. (3) one thread that keeps coming up over and over on the list is which HP mass storage devices work in which computers. collecting that list would be great. I have stored a number of these emails from the list if you want me to send you what I've kept on the subject. (4) I recently wanted to capture the contents of a ROM that was soldered into a board. I didn't want to unsolder it, so I used by HP 1631D logic analyzer to monitor all the pins while the computer was driving it with a test program that made sure every address was getting hit. I used my hp87 to drive the logic analyzer via HPIB and repeatedly sampled the pins, analyzed what was captured and repeated until I had seen all addresses. Finally I dumped the final ROM image to my PC via the serial adapter. It took me about four hours to figure out how to program everything, having never done it before. it would have been very useful for me to have seen other such code before I tried mine. I'd be happy to give you my program in case somebody else finds such a thing useful. It seems like there is very little in the way of HP-8x's BASIC examples on the web that I could find, much less examples showing how to drive test equipment.