Hi Stan and others,

...
> This is your opportunity to improve your own environment :)
>
> The subject came up frequently at SIG3000 last week!
>
> Contact SIGSysMan (chair: Donna Garverick [log in to unmask])
> ... one of the action items they now "own" is the:
>   "HP should give the HPIB driver source code to Interex
> and/or vendors".
>
> If HP did that, it would make it possible for you to obtain an HP-IB
> drive for MPE/iX 6.5 ... possibly free, possibly for a cost.
>
> Clearly, HP Marketing probably won't be in favor of this...but the
> old HP Way should make their way clear: help the customer!

I talked to our long time IO/driver expert here just a few hours ago on
this topic.  In his opinion, making HPIB driver source available won't
help any in the long run and probably not much in the short run.
Here's why (to the best of my recollection):

1. There are h/w and s/w pieces to HPIB, and there are no more HPIB cards
being sold TODAY.  You need HPIB cards to have HPIB devices, regardless of
what you do to the s/w portion of HPIB.

2. MPE/iX 6.5 supports large memory (and also large files), but the large
memory part matters re. HPIB.  The current HPIB drivers do not support
large memory (>= 4 GB).  The effort to modify the HPIB drivers to support
large memory is very large :}

3. Release 6.5 has new and complex-to-use APIs that would be very
challenging
to reverse engineer, and time consuming for us to explain/support, but any
updated HPIB driver will need to interface with these APIs -- sorry I forgot
the details here.

4. After 6.5, the entire IO systems uses PCI (rather than CIO) and all bets
are
off for HPIB.

That's the best explanation I have for thinking this is not a good Shared
Source project.  I think I do understand the desire for extending the life
of HPIB, but I think that will be too difficult and expensive to do.

regards,
Jeff Vance, CSY