GPIB was used on vintage lab instruments and similar hardware. It was later adopted by C64 and Acorn computer peripherals under the IEEE 488 banner.
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(Image credit: Wikipedia public domain imagery) The General Purpose Interface Bus (GPIB, AKA HP-IB) has finally received stable drivers, and will be merged in the Linux 6.19 kernel release, 53 years after it was launched by HP. Phoronix explains that GPIB support was first added to the mainline Linux kernel last year, but now they have been declared stable.
This driver addition was highlighted by Greg Kroah-Hartman in a staging pull request for Linux 6.19-rc1. “Here is the big set of staging driver updates for 6.19-rc1,” wrote Kroah-Hartman. “Only thing ‘major’ in here is that two subsystems, gpib and vc04 have moved out of the staging tree into the ‘real’ portion of the kernel, which is great to see.” The dev added that these additions have been tested for a while with no reported problems.
GPIB is an ancient interface that was developed by HP back in 1972. It was developed by the influential tech firm as a standard to connect its growing range of lab equipment to computers. The range of GPIB-connected devices would mostly cover things from the realms of electronic test and measurement instruments. That includes oscilloscopes, multimeters, logic analyzers, and more.
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/peripherals/cables-connectors/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/peripherals/cables-connectors/53-years-later-bus-standard-launched-by-hp-in-1972-gets-stable-linux-driver-general-purpose-interface-bus-has-blistering-8-mb-s-of-bandwidth#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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