There’s a fairly large second-hand market for old electronics test equipment. A lot of that stuff only had GPIB ports, even well into the 90s. Cheap Chinese entrants (Rigol, Siglent, etc.) only within the last decade started making an impact

Linux mainline kernel just had support for GPIB added. https://hackaday.com/2025/12/16/after-decades-linux-finally-...

Linux gpib also supports my adapter natively with a special linux gpib firmware you can download from the page above. It also supports multiple instruments connected to one adapter then.

I finished my Master's a couple years ago, and in our IC probing lab, it was almost all GPIB. All of the pieces of test equipment, except for a single cutting-edge Keysight scope (which used Ethernet instead), were connected together via those chunky but satisfying and robust cables, usually controlled via MATLAB or some other IC measurement software package.

Yes, those cables are often called "garden hose cables". The only benefit of that bus infrastructure under a nowadays view is that it gives the ability to synchronously trigger multple instruments which is very rarely used or required.

Crazy to think that the first HP9000 (PARISC) computers used GP-IB (aka HP-IB) for accessing disks!

I used one of those (and an even older little workstation that I forget the name) to program GPIB ("HPIB") systems.

This is my first ever engineering project, as a newly-minted electrical engineer (downloads a PDF): https://littlegreenviper.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/TF30...

I've worked places where the paperwork to hook something up via Ethernet drove us to use GPIB or RS485 for everything.

I know that very well. Ethernet=security concern. Connecting your shiny new scope to company network=no way. Hard to discuss arround it in company environments or push for split network topologies.