6 Sep
2010
6 Sep
'10
10:46 a.m.
I'll cut to the chase, in the window of 1980 there
were not a lot of
IEEE488 as it was harder to do as there were barely chip level
Maybe not a lot of manufacturers, but HP certainly made enough such
instruemtns. And actually, around 1900 there were several smaller
companies over here making GPIB building-blocks which were ofent
controlled by PETs.
solutions emerging.
You can trivially make a GPIB talker or listener in a few TTL chips. HP
almost always did it that way in their earlier dervices (for all the had
developned a single-chip HPIB interface)
But the gear that did 488 were often also available as serial 232
I can think of a lto of counterexamples...
Why serial, the wires can be far longer in exchange
for speed
(beyond 15M) and much cheaper. Speed was rarely an issue.
Ever see a 15M IEEE488 cable or buy one?
No, but there were IEEE-488 'extenders' which could use a twisted pair
connection or a pair of dial-up modems avaialble from virtually the
start. Take a look at the hP59403, for example.
I've run 10 or more IEEE-488 building blocks off a single interface. I
wonder just how many computers could take that many serial ports.
The only place outside of DEC I'd seen traditional MINCs were
for lab rat experiments in the academic world or the occasional
As I mentioned earlier, I have 3 MINCs. The 2 hard-disk ones (twin RL01s)
came from the phgsics departemnt of a university. The floppy-drive
MINC-23 came from the research labs of a utility company. I have no real
idea what any were used for,
I must admit I've seen many more HP-bnsed data acquisition systems,
9825s, 9836s, 9816s, etc.
-tony