IEEE488/VME/Unix

[Thomas W. Banister]

  When I read the news this morning I was amazed to see a bunch of postings
regarding my request for IEEE488/SysV/VME success stories. I posted that
a couple of months ago and have been feeling guilty about not acknowledging
the e-mail responses I got. It's very interesting how stuff propagates around
on USENET.

  Anyways, in summary: Most e-mailers and posters recommended National
Instruments. After implementing GPIB communications on a PC and reading manuals
and catalogs I believe National Instruments is the *only* viable source for
GPIB products. One person mentioned the Motorola MVME300, we have one of those
in house on a trial basis, more on that later. 

  I personally want to order the National Instruments 1014 board but here's
the rub. (which I didn't stress enough in my original posting) We using Unix
*SysV* and *shared memory*. This throws a real kink in porting drivers, 
especially since none of us here are driver gurus. And National Instruments 
doesn't currently sell a driver for SysV. An Alan Biocca mentioned the Motorola
MVME300 and the "secret, no charge, ported and bug fixed" driver for the board.
I hope you have a lot better luck than we've had so far. I'll say no more until
we know why it doesn't work and whether it's the board or the driver. There is
no sense in libeling anyone.

  The bottom line is we can't purchase our way out of this one. It's time to
do some driver hacking, ahem, I mean some engineering of driver software. 
Fortunately for me this project has been put on the back burner for a while.

						Thanks all,
						Tom Banister
						...!rochester!tropix!twb