HP-IB Mass Storage Emulation (Help)

I have been working for some time on a pet project to make a mass storage emulator for HP-IB systems. Given the massive improvement in capacity that has taken place the past 10 years, most mass storage devices from the 80s look pathetic. For example, take the HP 9133H which is a massive unit that can store about 5Mb. Even the compact flash cards that are bundled with popular digital cameras can do better than that. I started my project by trying to utilize the HP-IB drivers that are part of the NetBSD Open Source Unix clone (which runs on the HP 300 series), but I have come to realize that the HP-IB cards are the creating a new legacy issue. Open Source drivers for HP-IB cards are very hard to find and thus any solution that depends on them becomes de facto legacy (once the card itself is no longer sold, finding the card becomes almost as difficult as finding HP 9133H drives). So I looked hard at the HP-IB bus itself (using the schematics from the Series 80 adaptor) and it looks like a simple parallel bus. So why use a custom card, if the PC parallel port can be adapted to drive an HP-IB bus. If the PC parallel port can be used, then I can port the NetBSD drivers to use the parallel port, rather than the HP 300 HP-IB interface. The NetBSD drivers also support SS-80 compatible mass storage devices, which means that the implementation can be verified against a real HP-IB mass storage device. If this works than the drivers will have to be modified so that they become a mass storage "server" rather than a "client" (i.e. a device that responds to mass storage requests, instead of a computer that issues such requests). Small i386 compatible single board computers are easily procurable and embedded versions of *BSD and Linux systems run on these SBCs (they even accept compact flash cards or more traditional hard disks). This means that we can make a mass storage device that can physically fit inside the cabinet of the main unit (e.g. Integral PC, or HP-87). Anybody willing to provide assistance to this effort, is welcome to contact me. However, I think that going through this list may be more beneficial so that other people can contribute in the technical discussion. **vp