What I seem to recall mainly involved the handshaking between the controller and instruments. The Motorola CPU’s, PA-RISC CPU’s architecture did the I/O and handshaking very well. Another issue was multitasking. The Intel CPU’s (at that time) did not seem to do the I/O and handshaking nearly as well, and did not seem to multitask. The programs we tried to run on Intel CPU’s back in the 80’s would sporadically lock up, report timing issues, garble data. The HP 9000/300, 9000/700 series ran our software seamlessly. While working at HP on an on-site cal team we ran between 12 to 16 calibration procedures (via separate windows for each cal procedure) simultaneously on a 9000 system comprised of 1 ea. /750 server and 3 ea. /382’s workstations each with 4 GPIB busses, we could also add an additional 9000/382 if it was needed for the particular job/campaign. The control system was not slow and never bogged down. I do know that the older C110 workstations are still in use as the older HPUX/Basic calibration software has not been ported over to PC based workstations as yet.
Don Bitters
