Dr. P.L. Taylor (ptaylor at crc.ac.uk) wrote:
: >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.
Maybe it would be cheaper to buy a used Apple II? (Remember the good old
times when acronyms like GUI were unknown? :-)
--Cornelius.
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/* Cornelius Krasel, Abt. Lohse, Genzentrum, D-82152 Martinsried, Germany */
/* email: krasel at alf.biochem.mpg.de fax: +49 89 8578 3795 */
/* "People are DNA's way of making more DNA." (Edward O. Wilson, 1975) */
