30 Aug
2007
30 Aug
'07
3:05 p.m.
I _did_ have someone approach me at work, once, holding an HPIB cable,
and demanding to know where they were supposed to put *this*. I
Don't tempt me :-)
managed to stifle the obvious first answer and asked
about what was
_really_ going on. It seems that this person had asked for a bit of
lab equipment and a computer, but the lab equipment office failed to
pass along to the IT group that this person's PC should have an HPIB
card. The user was quite upset that he couldn't show up his first day
and start taking data immediately. We fixed him up in under an hour,
but that wasn't good enough to please him. From the waves he made
later about how "incompetent" the entire IT staff was, I later
regretted suppressing the initial suggestion I'd had when I first met
him.
Checking through some of the stuff I've picked up in my career as a
hacker (to paraphrase you-know-who), I've come across a set of routines
and a little hardware mod to link a GPIB device to a PC printer port. The
author of this stuff? None other than Chuck Guzis :-)
-tony