Often referred to as the IEEE-488.2 bus, GPIB bus or HP-IB bus, the GPIB (General Purpose Interface Bus) is a standard for instrumentation communication and control for instruments from manufactures the world over. In 1965, Hewlett-Packard designed the Hewlett-Packard Interface Bus (HP-IB) to connect their line of programmable instruments to their computers. Because of its high transfer rates (nominally 1 Mbytes/s), this interface bus quickly gained popularity. It was later accepted as IEEE Standard 488-1975, and has evolved to ANSI/IEEE Standard 488.1-1987. Today, the name General Purpose Interface Bus (GPIB) is more widely used than HP-IB. ANSI/IEEE 488.2-1987 strengthened the original standard by defining precisely how controllers and instruments communicate. Standard Commands for Programmable Instruments (SCPI) took the command structures defined in IEEE 488.2 and created a single, comprehensive programming command set that is used with any SCPI instrument.
The GPIB provides handshaking and interface communications over an 8 bit data bus employing 5 control and 3 handshake signals.
Equipped with a PCI-GPIB, a personal computer can: