Re: my lab

On Mon, 12 Oct 2009 10:11:05 +0100, Martin Brown
<|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

krw wrote:
On Sat, 10 Oct 2009 13:57:47 +0100, Martin Brown
<|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

krw wrote:
On Fri, 9 Oct 2009 17:42:58 -0700 (PDT), a7yvm109gf5d1@xxxxxxxxxxx
wrote:

On Oct 9, 7:09 pm, Joerg <inva...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

GPIB is terrible. The topper happened a long time ago, after I had just
laid new carpet. Connector slipped off, the garden hose cable
ricocheted, hit my coffee mug which was half full ... *THWACK* ... flew
Can you use ribbon cable? I've got a vintage GPIB controller here that
works on the Commodore 64. I've never tested it but it comes with a
ribbon cable.
I suppose you lose stackability and probably some performance with
ribbon.
Commodore 64 was pretty slow. You had to work very hard to get full
speed out of GPIB with the early PCs and micros. HP had a near monopoly
on it in the early days. All the chipsets had their little quirks.

It definitely worked better with the right grade of cables and you
could have them custom made to lengths well beyond what the standard
allowed and it would still work OK at speed. A lot of older instruments
still use it but Ethernet and USB have largely supplanted it now.
There is no performance to give up. It was a lucky day when GPIB
worked at all. ...and often the stackabiity was need *to* get it to
work. What a nightmare.
Rubbish. In it's day GPIB and IEE488 was a pretty much rock solid
workhorse and way ahead of its time. It degraded fairly gracefully
because of the handshake mechanism. I never much liked IEEE488.2 tho.

Bullshit. Even HP stuff didn't even work with HP stuff unless the
phase of the moon was right. Perhaps if you had one or two

You must be pretty thick if you couldn't get HPs own GPIB kit to work
properly. Never had any bother with Solartron either. Some very early
3rd party kit during the HPIB to GPIB transition was a bit flaky. And
there were some bad homebrew IEEE devices around in universities but
most of HP's kit would work first time and as advertised provided that
you gave each instrument a unique address on the bus. User error was
very common.

HP disk drives were a bit naughty and deliberately used response
sequences to blind the commercial IEEE bus analysers of the day. Not
that it affected us very much. Compared to RS232/RS485 it was stellar.

instruments it was OK, but try thirty. HPIB was slow crap, when it
did work. I'd *never* use it today. Too much of a PITA.

It wasn't all that slow if implemented well. And at the time it first
came out was both reliable and fast but over relatively short distances.

Regards,
Martin Brown

Yo, krw, 30 instruments on a single bus?? No wonder you had problems,
the bus does not support more than 7 devices on a single bus except
under special cases, and never more than 14 on a single bus.
The bus is not at fault if you refused to try to use it correctly.
.

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