HP-IB

[Zafar A. Mohammed]

What HP-IB stands for and what are its features.

[melvyn burnard]

It started out as Hewlett Packard Instrument Bus, and eventually became Hewlett Packard Interface Bus.
It is/was an HP proprietary interface origionally aimed at use with instrumentation, and then proliferated into use on computer systems to interconnect things like discs, tapes etc.
Was a parallel bus, very stable, but became obsolete with the SCSI bus becoming the norm in the Industry.
HTH

[paul courry]

HP-IB stands for Hewlett Packard Interface Bus. It is an old standard for connecting peripherals together and is rapidly being phased out of HP computer systems (but is still used in the Test & Measurement world if memory serves me).

It's speed was 1megabit per second and allowed several devices to be daisy chained together. It was the plug and play way to connect peripherals in it's day. It was tough, darn near bulletproof. It's limitations were its speed and the relatively short cable lengths permitted.

[melvyn burnard]

I forgot to add that the cable came in various lengths, and they were so robust one of the long cables used to make a darn good tow rope :-}