>We have an instrument (a luminometer) that, acccording to the manual, has
>a "BCD signal output suitable for interface with Apple II and other
>compatible data systems." The connector for this output is a Centronics
>style connector. However, we do not have an Apple II.
BCD stands for Binary Coded Decimal. It's an old-fashioned way of representing
data where in a parallel interface, each 4 lines represent one decimal digit.
The Apple II was an ideal machine to handle this kind of data, since its
6502 processor had a dedicated mode for BCD arithmetic. You cannot feed this
signal to a Mac since it has no parallel port. You probably could send it to
a PC, but you would need some software to make sense of it. Probably the
simplest way to deal with it (albeit expensive) would be to use the analogue
output, sending it to an analogue data-collection card in the computer.
Phil Taylor | MRC Reproductive Biology Unit
| Centre for Reproductive Biology
| 37 Chalmers Street
mbplt at seqnet.dl.ac.uk | Edinburgh EH3 9EW
ptaylor at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk | Scotland.
