CompuServe Thread

David – If Dennis is right that this is an old HPIB interface machine, maybe I can shed some light on a **possible** solution. I've been down this road myself a few years ago. (And gave up for the same reason that Dennis mentioned – the cost of the interface board – which was $1000+ at the time I was looking.) The HPIB (Hewlett Packard Interface Bus) is a type of parallel interface and is also known as the GPIB (General Purpose Interface Bus) by HP's competitors and as IEEE-488. HPIB is THE standard for instrumentation and data acquisition which is a rapidly expanding (Exploding!) area of interest. As a result, HPIB boards are widely available from a variety of vendors at affordable prices. HP's LIST price is $525. A random look in the back of Byte Magazine yielded a $145 card. I suspect that there are cheaper boards available (and that you get – within reason – what you pay for.) It's a guess – but a pretty good guess – that if the plotter is using the HPIB interface that it was intended to emulate a HP plotter and uses the HPGL language. I think you could plot to file using the driver for any HP plotter of the same vintage (some of the HP's had different step counts and you might have to experiment to find the right one to get a perfect scale match). Then direct the file out of the HPIB port using whatever software comes with the card. It might even be possible to use the trick that is recommended for Centronics type parell ports wher you plot to a file called LPT1; maybe you will be able to plot to a file called HPIB1? Good luck. If it works out, I guess we'd like to know. Mark Hannon