- GPIB-PC User Manual for the IBM Personal Computer and Compatibles April 1988 Edition Part Number 320014-01

Installation and Configuration Section Two
GPIB-PC User Manual 2-18 ©National Instruments Corp.
Using Your GPIB-PC
Now that your software and hardware are installed, read Section Three
for an introduction to the functions available for the GPIB-PC. The
functions are described in the order that you will most likely use them.
Pay special attention to Group I, Group II, and Group III.
After reading about these functions, practice using them with your
programmable instrument or device in an interactive environment using
the IBIC program described in Section Five. IBIC allows you to
program your instrument interactively from the computer keyboard rather
than from an application program. This helps you understand how the
device and the handler work. It also familiarizes you with status
information that is returned by each function and that is also available
to your application program in the form of global variables.
While running IBIC, study the descriptions of each function given in
Section Four to fully understand the purpose and syntax of each
function.
Finally, referring to the appropriate language supplement of Section
Four, write your application program. Whenever possible, use IBIC to
test the sequence of the GPIB-PC function calls your application
program makes. Trying your function calls from IBIC is especially
helpful if your application program responds in an unexpected manner.