In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "John Miles" writes: >Hmm. From what I can tell via Google, the rule is that you're supposed to >have two-thirds of the devices on the GPIB bus powered on. Good to know, >even though most of the devices I have don't seem to enforce this guideline.
It couldn't possibly enforce it, how do you tell the difference between two cables being connected and two cables meeting at a powered down instrument ? >I'll refrain from editorializing on the wisdom of designing an interconnect >bus with a rule like that, as foaming-at-the-mouth howling rants are OT for >the time-nuts list. You know, back when it was produced, the HP-IB was a pretty good sized improvement over random (and I mean *RANDOM*) ttl-bcd-with-some-extra-lines kind of instrument interfaces that existed. It also wasn't anticipated that people would cable it up without using it: it was mostly intended for use with instruments that saw so intense use that computer control could be afforded. So you can't really blame the designers back then for not imagining the future existence of self proclaimed nuts owning a few millions worth of HP kit which they don't power up unless they need it... fair is fair :-) -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [EMAIL PROTECTED] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list [email protected] https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts
