On 05/01/2017 02:51 PM, philo wrote:
He told me that at one time HP made equipment that no one else could
make....but now they make equipment no one else wants to bother with.


Possibly a bit of an exaggeration of both ends but like I said before
it's a different world

HP was the gold standard for instrumentation -- then came Carly. In all
fairness she inherited a mess.

I had one client that was big on Commodore PET computers. That would
seem to be an odd choice but Commodore used the GPIB, also known as the
HPIB or IEEE-488, to communicate with its peripherals. That meant it was
also able to talk to HP devices and it was one hell of a lot cheaper
than the HP9800 series. Something like $1000 versus $10000 iirc.