The Agilent 59301A is an ASCII-Parallel Converter. The 59301A ASCII-To-Parallel Converter is a very useful instrument, it allows units which are controlled via BCD input to be operated using the HP-IB. It does this by accepting byte-serial ASCII characters from HP-IB and converts them to parallel output. The 59301A can be used to control other functions using its hexadecimal format.