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Introduced on December 7, 1979 and looking outwardly similar to the IBM 5100 computer of four years earlier, the HP85 was used primarily for instrumentation control and data acquisition in scientific laboratories. It achieved this capability by being compatible with the IEE488 bus, which is also referred to as GPIB, IEC625, and HPIB. Hewlett-Packard invented HPIB in the 1960's to control their own instruments long before it became an IEEE standard. This bus is still in active use for instrumentation control today, and though the original HP85 computer was discontinued in 1984, there are still some around that continue to perform their original control and data acquisition functions.