HP 98046b serial interface

[sleibson]

Oh, almost forgot. That BCD card was designed by Larry Smith and the reason for its existence was the reason HP9825.com came into being. I spotted an old Non Linear Systems catalog in a used bookstore across the street from my condo. All of the old, old DVMs in that catalog had BCD I/O on the back panels, as did HP's original DVMs. That was the printer interface and was a simple electrical extension of the BCD counters in the DVMs. There was the data already on an I/O terminal and it was a simple matter to build an I/O card to allow a computer to capture and process that data. It's what we had before RS-232C, then HPIB/IEEE-488, and then finally USB and Ethernet. It's just a continuum.

So, within hours of spotting that catalog, I knew I had the seed crystal for the Web site. I called my wife from work and asked her to go and buy that catalog before it got "snapped up." I could not let another hour go by. The HP9825 was designed from the ground up to be an instrument controller and that focus is one reason, one of several, that led to its success. The reason that focus came to be was recently documented in an hour-long presentation by Don Morris at HHC 2016:

https://youtu.be/iQdtk3pk86M


--Steve