You wrote, "I find it hard to believe that so many instrument did not
really meet the spec...".
I think you ascribe too much computing intelligence to these
instruments. Many of these devices run a simple "homemade" operating
system, or better, a commercial single-threaded embedded operating
syst
Indeed the older instruments may not have been fully compliant. The
response time of the micros in these instruments running @ 4 Mhz is
just not good enough to respond to (or even change bus states) back to
back commands from a 3 GHz processor. They may also have depended
upon one of the other fo
This is something that I have wondered about. Often when using older
instruments with newer computers it is necessary to slow down the
writing of instrument specific commands (ie set freq, get number of
points). Writing two commands too closely in time causes the test
instrument to lock up or to