Bubble chamber film: the development of an online control system

Abstract

An on-line system has been developed for the measuring of events on bubble chamber film. The system is controlled by an IBM 1130 computer with 8K words of core, and a core cycle time of 3.6ysec. Up to six measuring machines may be operated simultaneously, and the system will also handle the collection of data from a core store which is part of a cosmic ray experiment. At present four machines are operating on-line. These had previously been used for off-line measuring when the data were punched onto paper tape. A comparison between the off-line system and the on-line system of measuring reveals that the development of the latter system has resulted in an increase in the measuring rate of approximately 50%, and a similar increase in the percentage of events which are successfully reconstructed by the geometry programme THRESH. As a result, the number of events that are successfully measured per machine per hour has more than doubled.