Sniffing the HP-IB Bus with vintage Logic Analyzers

Demonstration of two vintage Hewlett-Packard instruments for debugging HP-IB bus traffic, the HP 59401A Bus Analyzer (vintage 1977), and the HP 10342B Bus Pre-processor and HP 1670G Logic Analyzer combo. HP-IB is HP's pre-PC high-performance universal bus for connecting peripherals. At the time, this proprietary bus vastly outperformed competition. It is used by my both my vintage HP instruments and my vintage HP peripherals, like the 9-track tape drive I am trying to debug right now. HP-IB eventually got displaced by the far less capable but cheaper parallel port in PCs, and the open standard and faster SCSI for discs. But it is still alive and well 40 years later in the instrumentation market, now in it's standardized GPIB (also called IEEE 488) form. This pair of instruments were restored specifically in anticipation of dealing with vintage peripherals working on this unusual bus. Today they finally got put to real use.