[time-nuts] IOTECH 488 EPROM

[gary]

Both of mine came from flea markets. Around 2000. Well into the ebay 
era, but you could still find stuff locally. Vendors think GPIB looks 
like centronix, so they just dump the stuff.

Also in the dark ages was the HP Basic Language card. If you never heard 
of it, you will probably groan. It was a card (ISA I guess) you put in a 
PC that ran HP Basic. It had the GPIB port on the back. So you had a 
whole PC dedicated set up to run a dinky HP desktop computer emulator. 
However, if you were into legacy code, you paid the price.
> http://hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=681

You didn't need a Vectra in theory, buy everyone bought the Vectra 
because nobody wanted the job of making the card work in some clone.

On 3/20/2012 9:20 PM, Joseph Gray wrote:
>> Back to GPIB, in the dark ages, I used one of the ICS boxes which used a Z80
>> to emulate an old HP desktop computer. For me, it was heaven. I just
>> translated the HP Basic to C.
>>
>>
>> Rocky Mountain Basic is a way to describe HP Basic out of Colorado without
>> getting sued.
>
> HP BASIC was quirky, but boy was it powerful. Many years ago, I had to
> decipher some real spaghetti code that an engineer did in HP BASIC and
> rewrite it. Actually, I had to do that with with several programs he
> wrote. Not one comment in any of them.
>
> As for getting those NI boxes for a few dollars, I need to shop where
> you guys do :-) Whenever I look for neat stuff online, it always seems
> to be over priced. I rarely get those dirt cheap bargains.
>
> Joe Gray
> W5JG
>
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