IEEE-488 is a digital communications bus specification, also commonly known as HP-IB (Hewlett-Packard Instrument Bus) and GPIB (General Purpose Interface Bus). The IEEE-488 bus was developed to connect and control programmable instruments, and to provide a standard interface for communication between instruments from different sources in ATE (Automatic Test Equipment) system. GNU/Linux have a support for GPIB (IEEE 488) hardware; Linux GPIB Package. The package contains kernel driver modules, and a C user-space library with Guile, Perl, PHP, Python and TCL bindings, but many USB-GPIB adapters and a few other boards additionally require proprietary, closed-source firmware to be uploaded to the adapter after it is powered on. Supported hardware here and other driver.