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Several years ago, I put together an acquisition system that
collected data from FACS sorters that employ the universal data
lister. A '386 PC running Quarterdeck's DESQView was used. The
digital data were run into a single digital I/O card, and using
double buffering the data were checked for consistency and written
directly to disk as FCS 2.0 files. Data acquisition could proceed at
up to 10,000 events per second of four parameter data. Data analysis
could run at the same time in another DESQView Window. Though not
recommended, data could be written directly to a remote server disk
over an ethernet connection.
(DESQView has quite good multitasking. To see how far we could push
the envelope we had a 20MHz '386 with two ethernet cards (one running
Coulter's EPINET, and the other running PC-NFS) and two serial ports
all operating simultaneously. This allowed downloading data from an
MDADS II via EPINET, data from a pdp/11-73 via a 9600 baud serial
line, data from a pdp/11-23 via another 9600 baud serial line, and
data transfers over the network to a Sun server. All transfers ran
without problems.)
Bidirectional operations (data acquisition and instrument control)
add further levels of complexity that a more robust (and
appropriately more complex) operating system such as OS/2 may handle
more easily.
Dave Coder
dcoder@u.washington.edu
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