All in all, it might be cheaper and easier for you to find an old PC and stick FreeBSD or Linux on it and a ISA GPIB card in it :-)
True.
If I was perfectly rational about it, I should didth this old Sun and buy a decent PC.
The machine uses quite a bit of power I suspect (given the heat it produces) and its 4 x 450MHz CPUs are not as fast as one decent Pentium IV box. And it would sell on eBay for a lot more than a PC would cost me to buy. It has 4GB of RAM, and Sun RAM is pretty expensive.
I could no doubt scronge an old PC from work.
Another possible option is Labview. We have a departmental license at work for academic purposes (I work in a universtiy) and that might well allow home use. The license does allow use on Solaris, but whether you need to buy the GPIB board drivers if you use Solaris I do not know. I suspect if you have National Instruments Labview, it will reconise a NI card and not need other drivers installed, but I could be wrong.
I have written my own GPIB code before to control a Standford Lock-in amp (did it as part of my PhD), but learning Labview would not be a bad skill to have. It's useful to add to a CV.
I will check out the license and driver situation for Labview today. Sometimes home-use licenses for universities do not extend to Solaris, as it does not with Mathematica. But in that case Wolfram Reserach, the producers of Mathematica, have said they will accept it as a "one off".
-- Dr. David Kirkby, G8WRB
Please check out http://www.g8wrb.org/ of if you live in Essex http://www.southminster-branch-line.org.uk/
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