Wow -- these are funny computers. If I'm not mistaken the Aspect 3000
is a more modern looking machine than the Bruker/Nicolet one that
Sellam has pictures of. I'd love to see a picture of it if you can
get one.
It has semiconductor memory. It uses some bit-slice ALU or other. The
disk drive that's with it, if it's a removable type, is probably RK05
compatible, although I read that later models supported SCSI disks.
I used one of these in graduate school that was part of an
experimental NMR imager (this was before the marketing types came up
with "MRI" to get rid of the word "nuclear"). It came with an
assembler and Pascal compiler. If I'm not mistaken the OS was called
Adakos. It was a two-task foreground/background thing. Our
application program was called Tomikon, but I think the one used for
analytical work was called DISNMR.
Sad to say I can't remember the history of the Bruker/Nicolet link.
It may be that Bruker started out making just spectrometers and
originally bought their computers from Nicolet (or vice versa). But,
I believe that the Aspect 3000 was entirely Bruker's creation. Back
the mid to late 80's, they were making and selling these out of
Karlsruhe, Germany, and had a sales/support office in Billerica, MA.
I spent a week at the Karlesuhe factory for training.
These machines are probably still in use in the basements of
University chemistry departments and possibly in corporate labs. If
the University that has it doesn't want it, they might find a taker
by posting on one of the NMR newsgroups. Or, someone with a keen
interest in bizarre Pascal implementations should rescue this.
Brian
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_| _| _| Brian Knittel
_| _| _| Quarterbyte Systems, Inc.
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Received on Wed Oct 01 2003 - 16:52:22 BST