Way back when instrument control was the "Thing" in the instrumentation world. The HP controllers were focused on I/O control (Motorola based, PA RISC, etc.) (9825A, 9830A, 9845A, series 9000/200, 300, 500, 700, C110, C180, C270). PC based (Intel, etc.) generally did not handle I/O well, at least for instrument control.?
HP Basic was a great tool and generally established the market for instrumentation control, especially when they gave it to the marketplace.
It evolved and then HP was splitting itself into Agilent (instruments) and become a computer company (ies) and HP ported HP Basic to HP-UX, then a little later dropped support for HP Basic.?
HT Basic created/ported HP Basic to the Intel platform and the rest is history.
