The board permitted any S-100 system to act as a listener, talker or
controller in a IEEE-488 bus system.
The P&T-488 had four read/write registers which appear as four input/output
(I/O) ports to the S-100 host machine. The ports were addressed as four
consecutive I/O ports with the first port address an integral multiple of 4
(0, 4, 8, 0CH, .... FCH). The addresses used by the P&T-488 were
set by means of a DIP switch on the upper left corner of the interface
board. All boards were set at the factory for I/O ports 7C through 7F Hex,
and all software supplied by Pickles & Trout assumes these addresses. The
address used by both the board and the software could be changed by the
user. Working with instruments on the IEEE-488 bus requires
knowledge of how this bus worked. The manual provided by Pickles & Trout
that came with this board did a reasonable job of this. They also provided
software examples.
The manual for this board can be obtained
here.
There was a good review of this board by Richard Newrock in the April 1983 issue of
Microsystems (Vol 4,#4, p74) it can be obtained
here.
Peter Anderson wrote up an excellent article about Interfacing to the 488
bus in the Sept. 1984 issue of Microsystems (Vol 5, #9, p88). It can be
obtained
here.
