Nicolet 290 needs home

From: Ken Marshall <kmar_at_lle.rochester.edu>
Date: Wed Oct 1 14:43:36 1997

At 06:14 AM 9/27/97 +0000, you wrote:
>Found this on alt.folklore.computers
>
> We have a working (or at least it was) Nicolet 290 computer. that
> need to vacate the room its been taking up for the last 20+ years.
>This system is rigged up as a test bench for an MRI system (that's
>all still there too) and we have all the manuals, disk packs, paper
>tape programs, banks of core memory etc etc.. I plan to do a small
>inventory of the parts and pieces but if I don't find it a home soon
>it'll get smashed up.
> Does anyone know anything about these computers? I have no idea what
>else they may have been used for or how rare this thing is. Anything
>anyone knows about it could be helpful towards finding it a proper
>home. BTW.. Size wise you're looking at a large console with a plotter
>built in and a short 19 inch rack plus many boxes of disk packs
>(Diablo) and manuals.
>
> Ken Montgomery
> CSU Sacramento
> kenm_at_csus.edu (Ken Montgomery)
>
>I've never heard of a Nicolet 290... What is it?
>
>Ken Harbit
>krh03_at_cvip.fresno.com
>

The Nioclet 290 is a dedicated instrument controller and data acquisition
computer made by Nicolet Instrument Corp. in Madison, Wisconsin. Nicolet is
a major manufacturer of Fourier transform (FT) infrared spectrometers, and
at one time also manufactured FT Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectrometers.
I have one of the 290's great-grandchildren, the NIC 660, still operating a
FTIR spectrometer in my lab. My system was purchased new in 1986, and is
still running reasonably well. I don't know a lot about the 290, but what I
can tell you about these computers in general is that they are essentially
totally proprietary platforms that were designed and built from the ground
up to control FTIR and FT NMR instrumentation and process spectral data.
The design of the systems were optimized to handle fast Fourier
transformation of spectoscopy data "on-the-fly" as it came off of the
spectrometer. These computers use a proprietary operating system written
by Nicolet (NICOS) which is somewhat Forth-like but has a user shell
running on top. The user shell bears some resemblance to Unix. The 660
system I have has applications software for IR spectroscopy, some text
editors, and compilers for Fortran, Basic, and Pascal. Nicolet stopped
manufacturing these computers and switched over to PC's about 3-5 years
ago, but still maintains some limited support (ie, parts and supplies) for
these proprietary machines.
Received on Wed Oct 01 1997 - 14:43:36 BST