In the 1960s, Hewlett-Packard (HP) manufactured various automated test and measurement instruments, such as digital multimeters and logic analyzers.

It became known as the General Purpose Interface Bus (GPIB), and became a de facto standard for automated and industrial instrument control.

These standards formalized the mechanical, electrical, and basic protocol parameters of GPIB, but said nothing about the format of commands or data.

[3] IEEE 488.2 provided for basic syntax and format conventions, as well as device-independent commands, data structures, error protocols, and the like.

[16] Active extenders allow longer buses, with up to 31 devices theoretically possible on a logical bus.

One unusual feature of IEEE 488 connectors is they commonly use a "double-headed" design, with male on one side, and female on the other.

Early versions of the standard suggested that metric screws should be blackened to avoid confusion with the incompatible UTS threads.

[21] The IEC 60625 standard prescribes the use of 25-pin D-subminiature connectors (the same as used for the parallel port on IBM PC compatibles).

HP's designers did not specifically plan for IEEE 488 to be a peripheral interface for general-purpose computers; the focus was on instrumentation.

Some of HP's advanced pocket calculators of the 1980s, such as the HP-41 and HP-71B series, also had IEEE 488 capabilities, via an optional HP-IL/HP-IB interface module.

The Commodore PET (introduced 1977) range of personal computers connected their peripherals using the IEEE 488 bus, but with a non-standard card edge connector.

[28] Several third party suppliers of Commodore 64 peripherals made a cartridge for the C64 that provided an IEEE 488-derived interface on a card edge connector similar to that of the PET series.

The hardware interface enabled devices made by different manufacturers to communicate with a single host.

There was no requirement for galvanic isolation between the bus and devices, which created the possibility of ground loops causing extra noise and loss of data.

Implementation options (e.g. end of transmission handling) can complicate interoperability in pre-IEEE 488.2 devices.