Could the Tried and True IEEE 488 Communication Standard Be Nearing the End of Its Reign?

摘要

Today, less and less test equipment comes standard with a GPIB communication interface. Many don't even offer it as an option. It wasn't that long ago manufacturers included a GPIB interface standard on most test equipment. If you wanted to sell your electronic test equipment and get top dollar, it had to be GPIB compatible. But not anymore! For more than 40 years, GPIB was the defacto standard for instrumentation control. It was simple to set up, easy to use, cross platform compatible. It controlled everything--not just test equipment; printers, hard drives, and all kinds of computer peripherals had GPIP versions at one time. At 8MB/S, it was also screaming fast running, supporting up to 15 instruments at one time and communicating with a device as far as 20 meters away. It also supported bi-directional communications, as well as instrument to instrument communications. When I was first introduced to the General Purpose Interface Bus (GPIB), I thought it was amazing. I was new to automation, and computers at that time were not user friendly. Low level programming in C was the norm, and instrument control commands were more like cryptography. What has stuck in my mind all these years was when an engineer I was working with told me when they created the HPIB standard back in the late 60s, 8MB/S was theoretical. At that time, I was programming on a 286 computers with a top speed of 6 MHz.