Good People, Support of legacy instrument drivers has become a huge problem (well, at least for me) to the compliance engineering community. If a company no longer supports an instrument, or will not upgrade an instrument support system to production platforms, perhaps the community should encourage the release of the source code to the IEEE or post it on Source Forge.
A good example of giving away old versions is Borland; a good example of giving away (to the public) discontinued software is TurboPower. So this has been done... Does the IEEE have a policy on encouraging the release of old stuff, or have an office that would be interested in becoming a "clearing house" for these legacy software systems ? Please note that the rights to the software can be retained by the original company, even after the source has been released to the public. I feel that many corporations have been scared away from this by the (somewhat) draconian requirements of the GNU/GPL open-source license. luck, Brian -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [ mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, March 03, 2004 3:52 AM To: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] Subject: Re: HP (Agilent) 85869PC software In a message dated 3/3/2004 3:43:25 AM Central Standard Time, [email protected] writes: I called Agilent, and of course, they do not support this software anymore. I know this is an older setup, but has anyone had sucess running this software on a newer PC system with Win 2K or XP? Hi Tim, In defense of HP, changing from a 16 bit operating system to a 32 bit operating system created a lot of problems for us: enough that Schaffners COmpliance 3 software for Emissions and Immunity has been rewritten from scratch. That's a huge investment, and maybe HP decided not to go that route. I've tried running our older Dongle based CIS test software on windows 98 second edition, and found on the very fast PC's that the parrallel port "looses" the dongle. We believe this is a timing issue, but frankly, it felt like a time black hole...... The CIS ( 16 bit software ) software seems to run on Win 2000 and XP, but becomes unpredictable. So much so that we don't support it because there is no consisitancy to the problams that do crop up. Finally, the HP 8566 and HP 8568 took some time to write drivers for. These instruments have in intricate set of commands to talk to the SA/Preselector and QP adaptor. I would imagine that the slightest change in command behaviour ( as a result of operating system changes ) would produce interesting results. That said, this is a super instrument, and has many years of life yet. Hope this Helps, Derek Walton.
