Question For The List

Don Y wrote: actually was the most elaborate curve tracer one ever could hope to have access to. We did curve tracing in the lab to primary standards calibrated from NBS with at the time advanced HP 6 place voltage meters. Reason was partly for obvious use in radiological environments, but it was also an attempt to speed up the time element I refered to w/o having to let semiconductors lay around for years to see affects. the plastics, ceramics, and metals used in the manufacture are nowhere near as pure as the semiconductor materials used, so they wanted to see what zapped what. gamma, xray, beta, and alpha, and what did it do, and how fast. when I got there, it was all over but for the lab, and the data was published. We used the lab for other materials experiments, and moved onto other endeavors. We had a PDP8/I which was my intro to a computer I could actually play with (actually also the Microdata 1600 was around too, but there were more users for it). the 8/I was exclusive to me, and I built an interface from the HP voltmeters to the I so that data could be punched on paper tape directly. The rig that HP had sold had a data concentrator hooked to some custom gizmo which could either record on the paper printers that hp made that fit 1/2 an HP hole (dont recall model) or send it out to a Friden Flexowriter. We took the paper tapes to a DG Nova which converted the "lines" of data to card image format, and sent them into the 360/50 we had to a big fortran program, that did the graphing and other stuff. It's how I ended up with an EE degree and am currently doing embedded programming. less smoke involved.