GPIB in the Leenucks Kernel

[Meadhbh Hamrick]

Saw this go by on Hackaday and had some pleasant memories of sharing
floppy drives and printers among various commodore machines at the
computer lab at my high school.

I'm not sure I've seen lab equipment that used GPIB in a couple decades,
but it's good to know my leenucks box will talk to it.

https://hackaday.com/2025/12/16/after-decades-linux-finally-gains-stable-gpib-support/

&c &c, M

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CTRL is to the left of the 'A' key.

[Jeffrey Nelson]

As far as i remember this interface was known as HPIB years ago I had several HP CPM machines, that I had connected to a series 3000 mini through this interface, hooked up in series.

Sent from my Galaxy

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[Meadhbh Hamrick]

Yup.  I think they changed the name from HP-IB to GPIB when it was
standardized.

[Jeffrey Nelson]

That make sence 

[Clifford Haight]

Yep, also known as ieee-488

Very common if you work in the scientific industry, cards and adapter still being made.

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From: 'Meadhbh Hamrick' via Seattle Retro-Computing Society <seattle-...@googlegroups.com>

Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2025 3:38 PM
To: Jeffrey Nelson <JSNel...@outlook.com>; seattle-...@googlegroups.com <seattle-...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [SRCS] GPIB in the Leenucks Kernel

 

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[Disk Crasher]

Back in the 90s the company I still work for used to build circuit boards. An employee took an HP pen plotter and replaced one of the pens with a conductor and a wire that fed back to an HP DVM which was connected to an HP PC via GPIB. Custom software was written in Rocky Mountain BASIC to compare the board to a golden board netlist ensuring no opens or shorts (capacitance testing). Later I bought a GPIB card for the MS-DOS PC and converted the code to Microsoft Professional BASIC which sped things up considerably. Aside from its clunky (but robust) connectors, GPIB was interesting in the fact that you could daisy chain multiple devices together on the same bus.

[J.P. McGlinn]

I have some cables available if anyone needs to realize or merely relive their ieee-488 dreams. 

Sent from my iPhone

On Dec 17, 2025, at 18:33, Disk Crasher <diskc...@gmail.com> wrote:

Back in the 90s the company I still work for used to build circuit boards. An employee took an HP pen plotter and replaced one of the pens with a conductor and a wire that fed back to an HP DVM which was connected to an HP PC via GPIB. Custom software was written in Rocky Mountain BASIC to compare the board to a golden board netlist ensuring no opens or shorts (capacitance testing). Later I bought a GPIB card for the MS-DOS PC and converted the code to Microsoft Professional BASIC which sped things up considerably. Aside from its clunky (but robust) connectors, GPIB was interesting in the fact that you could daisy chain multiple devices together on the same bus.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/seattle-retrocomp/5d947a12-ef7a-49cc-8103-6f8e12301d66n%40googlegroups.com.

[Alan Perry]

These days I work at Fluke on the various Linuxes used in our products. I think all of the calibrator (electrical, thermal, and pressure) products can talk over GPIB.

alan

On Dec 17, 2025, at 18:33, Disk Crasher <diskc...@gmail.com> wrote:

Back in the 90s the company I still work for used to build circuit boards. An employee took an HP pen plotter and replaced one of the pens with a conductor and a wire that fed back to an HP DVM which was connected to an HP PC via GPIB. Custom software was written in Rocky Mountain BASIC to compare the board to a golden board netlist ensuring no opens or shorts (capacitance testing). Later I bought a GPIB card for the MS-DOS PC and converted the code to Microsoft Professional BASIC which sped things up considerably. Aside from its clunky (but robust) connectors, GPIB was interesting in the fact that you could daisy chain multiple devices together on the same bus.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/seattle-retrocomp/5d947a12-ef7a-49cc-8103-6f8e12301d66n%40googlegroups.com.

[Brad Srebnik]

Does anyone have a working GPIB device that does anything interesting?  I have a Tek 4051 that
can control GPIB devices but I've never had a device to hook it took up to.

And Alan - I worked at Fluke and caught the tail end of 1722 (GPIB) instrument controller work.

Brad

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Virus-free.www.avast.com

[Mike Begley]

I have a few GPIB thingees:

A 3.5" floppy (HP-9122)

An HP hard disk

A thermal printer.

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From: seattle-...@googlegroups.com <seattle-...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Brad Srebnik <bra...@frontier.com>
Sent: Tuesday, December 23, 2025 1:11:18 PM
To: seattle-...@googlegroups.com <seattle-...@googlegroups.com>

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/seattle-retrocomp/7a74f159-dba4-4763-b145-8b140bf74303%40frontier.com.

[Brad Srebnik]

Thanks ... but interested in something more along the lines of something that moves, ideally in an
addressable X-Y fashion (like a plotter), or maybe a GPIB-controlled motor perhaps or a GPIB-controlled
light show thingie.  Would spend ~$50 if there was some sort of kit where I could build amusing.

Short of that, testing something on it just to see if it works would be informative.

Brad