by Garth » Thu Oct 01, 2020 11:18 pm
It seems like an awful lot of the discussion would be overlapping, otherwise it wouldn't be the DM41X, right? But we do have a lot of hardware sections of the forum that would not apply, like about card readers, HPIL, bar code, cassette, modules, etc.. Myself, I got into the 41 for its ability, through HPIL, to control and take data from a lot of pieces of electronics test equipment on the workbench, and interface to them all at once. You cannot do that with the DM-<anything>. I have the HP82169A HPIL-to-IEEE488 interface converter, the FSI164A HPIL-to-RS232 interface converter (like, and mostly compatible with, the HP82164A, but with two RS-232 channels, and optionally up to eight, plus the option to run on battery power), and the HP82165A HPIL-to-parallel interface converter, and of course you can use them all at once, plus having a lot of pieces of equipment connected to the '169A all at once, plus printer, mass storage, whatever, on HPIL, up to 31 devices altogether at once. So although the DM41X has a lot of advantages (including being in current production), this is not one of them.