Jeff Liebermann wrote:

"Michael A. Terrell" hath wroth:

Have you EVER seen any instrumentation cards for a MAC? I've seen
ISA, EISA, PCI and the pc-104 industrial variant os the EISA buss.

Add EPIC, EPIC Express, ITX, Mini-ITX, Nano-ITX, EBX, PCI-104, PC-104
Plus, CompactPCI, EPIC, EPIC-Express, PC/104, PC/104-Plus,
PC/104-Express, PICMG, AMC, ETX, ECX, XTX, COM-Express, COM-Express,
and probably a few I've missed. PC's own the industrial control
market. The catch is that most boards are rather expensive.


You do have to consider the total volume of sales vs the engineering
costs, plus these items are generally not built with all jelly bean
parts.

The HP 85 desktop computer with the tape drive, tiny monochrome
monitor and IEEE-488 port was used at Microdyne for some very old
equipment for test and alignment, till they finally hired a programmer
to write new software for a PC.

http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/hp85.html


See:
http://www.mini-itx.com
On the right side is a list of "projects" that various users have
built. They range from ingenious to ludicrous. All are interesting.
I suppose that could be done with a disembowled Mac, but Apple doesn't
sell motherboards so it requires cannibalization of a complete
machine. So much for the hobbyist market.


http://www.measurementcomputing.com/index.html was our supplier for
PC-104 IEEE-488 interface boards. They used to be Computer Boards, Inc.


--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida