In 1965, Hewlett-Packard, then a major manufacturer of electronic test instruments (now Agilent), developed a method allowing its instruments communicate and exchange data with each other. The method, their engineers developed, was a hardware standard and communications protocol known as HP-IB (Hewlett-Packard Instrumentation Bus).
HP-IB became quite popular and IEEE adopted it as a standard in 1975; the IEEE-488 bus, also widely known as the general purpose instrumentation bus (GPIB). Around 10 years later, the standard was revised to resolve a number of ambiguities that were not spelled out in the original standard. The newer version of the standard is known as IEEE-488.2.