{"id":1388,"date":"2022-12-27T22:18:18","date_gmt":"2022-12-27T22:18:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/?p=1388"},"modified":"2025-02-27T13:03:29","modified_gmt":"2025-02-27T13:03:29","slug":"minc-and-gpib","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/minc-and-gpib\/","title":{"rendered":"MINC and GPIB"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Every MINC system came with a GPIB &#8211; IEEE488 interface, and it is described in a dedicated volume in the MINC manual set &#8211; book 5. So, obviously, the PDP2011 MINC has to have GPIB too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And if that wasn&#8217;t reason enough, the XXDP disk packs have chains of tests specific to the MINC that include testing the GPIB hardware, and it&#8217;d be too cool to be able to run those without error messages, hangs, or changes. So I&#8217;ve added another MINC module called ibv11.vhd that implements the logic for the GPIB interface.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It passes the VIBB MAINDEC test &#8211; that was the whole point of adding it. But it doesn&#8217;t have the external signals that a &#8216;real&#8217; GPIB interface would have yet, and I don&#8217;t know if it would actually work with real GPIB hardware. And there&#8217;s a very simple reason for that: I don&#8217;t own or have access to any hardware that has GPIB interfaces, and everything I&#8217;ve found so far is prohibitively expensive, not guaranteed to work properly, or so obsolete it&#8217;d require a significant project to restore it &#8211; and mostly all of that at the same time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What I&#8217;d need is a working setup of a master (something like a pc card and some software, probably, but it could be anything really) and an instrument &#8211; so as to have something to compare to as well as something to test against. And cables to connect the various items &#8211; the reason I&#8217;m mentioning that is that I&#8217;ve seen those listed for hundreds of dollars too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That&#8217;s where it is &#8211; the logic is there, it passes the test, and it is probably near 80% of what a real implementation would need. And the only purpose it serves now is that it allows running the original test chains. But only if you configure it to be included &#8211; like everything in PDP2011, if you don&#8217;t configure it, it won&#8217;t be included, won&#8217;t take any resources, or even be observable in the compiled system. A stub, if you will, ready to be expanded if and when I might find the hardware I&#8217;d need.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Every MINC system came with a GPIB &#8211; IEEE488 interface, and it is described in a dedicated volume in the MINC manual set &#8211; book 5. So, obviously, the PDP2011 MINC has to have GPIB too. And if that wasn&#8217;t reason enough, the XXDP disk packs have chains of tests specific to the MINC that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-minc","category-pdp11","missing-thumbnail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1388"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1388\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1499,"href":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1388\/revisions\/1499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}