Merged to the mainline Linux kernel last year was GPIB drivers in the kernel’s “staging” area. GPIB is the General Purpose Interface Bus launched by HP back in 1972 for lab equipment and more. After a year of cleaning up the code in the kernel’s staging area, for Linux 6.19 the GPIB drivers have been promoted out of the staging area and into the Linux kernel proper. The Linux kernel now has stable driver support for this 8 Mbyte/s parallel bus that was introduced 53 years ago.
Since being accepted into the kernel’s staging area last year, the GPIB code for supporting vintage lab instruments and other hardware has continued to be cleaned up in newer kernel versions and was nearing the point of graduating staging. That’s thanks to passionate hardware folks with the standard itself being long obsolete thanks to the likes of USB, Firewire, and Ethernet. The Linux kernel’s staging area as a reminder for any new users is effectively a proving grounds / portion of the kernel where code can reside until it’s cleaned-up and in better shape for being formally maintained within the Linux kernel source tree.
Sounds like HP sucks and does not contribute to open source projects.
I think my old scope still has this bus. Well, it also has Windows 98…
Very cool. I’ve used this for about a five year period in my career. Used it to control test equipment, and there’s definitely systems out there today still using it.
I am actually debating getting a serial adapter for it. At my work we have an old Norma 3 phase power meter that is an unkillable beast with a very good update rate, and it only has GPIB but as we modernize, it could definitely be used to automate testing.
It was worth, in today’s money, like 100k€ or something crazy.
Most equipment these days uses SCPI which replaced GPIB, some still use the GPIB connector, but often they just use USB serial (CDC ACM).
Interesting. All the systems that I knew of they were refreshing to use ethernet with static IP address addresses instead.
Yeah, all the stuff I see at work runs over Ethernet or USB. Old stuff is serial, maybe the really old stuff uses these buses, but I’d probably have to hunt down the darkest, dustiest corners to find one of those.
I did recently see a big old washing machine hard drive and tape machine being disposed of a few weeks ago. Those were pieces of history.
