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The instrument bus that never rolled
December 12, 2006

In April 1989, Personal Engineering published a guest editorial by Tom DeSantis, then president of IOtech, called "Is SCSI the communications protocol of the 90s?" DeSantis believed that the small computer systems interface would give RS-232 and IEEE 488 competition as an instrument bus. Well, SCSI never left the gate because it never had a chance. DeSantis admitted, "SCSI doesn't inherently support the same level of control attributes users are accustomed to finding in the IEEE 488 bus." He argued that

IEEE-488 and RS-232 remained the most popular buses through the 1990s with both still in wide use today. The enhanced parallel port also made a run, but it too didn't get very far. Ethernet has been making a long run, recently boosted by LXI, but it still has a way to go because there are just so many instruments with those connectors in use today. USB is gaining in popularity, especially in lab applications where engineers don't need to worry about a connector that's flimsy compared to IEEE 488 and RS-232.

Posted by Martin Rowe on December 12, 2006 | Comments (0)