29 Nov
1999
29 Nov
'99
10:40 a.m.
I just saw some rack mounted oscilloscopes out on the
loading dock. They are
manufactured by trancor northern, and have a quad height slot available from
the rear of the unit (no cover for the slot). It has a dual height LSI11
cpu board (DEC), and another dual height board installed(DEC). The second
unit is the same, except the second card has generic white handles.
Does anyone know about these things? one rack has two of these, and
under them is a dual 8" floppy drive unit, that has a small ribbon
connector that connects to something via a 25 pin rs-232 connector.
It's *probably* a multichannel analyzer (MCA), not an oscilliscope. MCA's
look at pulse heights and generate real-time cumulative histograms of
pulse height on the screen.
Tracor Northern is one of the more prolific manufacturers of MCA's.
I once got to look at a MCA from the late 1940's, and it was fascinating:
the input pulse was amplified, then fed to a solenoid that kicked a ball
bearing up in a ballistic trajectory. There were bins that accumulated
ball bearings according to how hard they'd been kicked. Fascinating
machine!
Of course, modern MCA's use computers to do the counting :-).
--
Tim Shoppa Email: shoppa(a)trailing-edge.com
Trailing Edge Technology WWW: http://www.trailing-edge.com/
7328 Bradley Blvd Voice: 301-767-5917
Bethesda, MD, USA 20817 Fax: 301-767-5927