Re: Why Apple II?

[fl332@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (John L. Graham)]

I work in basic and applied research, which is largely a business of
one-of-a-kind hardware producing mountains of numbers and crunching
those numbers. Eye candy doesn't count for much and often just gets
in the way. We were one of the first labs where I work to make wide
use of micro-computers for data acquisition and we started out on
Apple II+'s. Over the next ten years we accumulated quite a few
Apple II's of every description, though our current stockpile consists
mainly of IIe's and IIGS's. They continue to serve the role for which
they were originally purchased; simple data acquisition systems that
are easy to program and adapt to a great variety of tasks. Furthermore,
the data can be easily ported to any other platform we wish for
further processing.

You were asking about the 8 bit machines. In recent years we've tended
to use IIGS's in the data acquisition role largely because of the
better memory management of the GS which makes it a better system
for handling the large volumes of data we typically take. We tend to
use IIe's more as platforms to run AW3 for recording information in
spread sheets. These allow us to keep detailed records about our tests,
keep track of QA/QC records, and conduct basic calculations all in one
form.

A good example is a system I recently completed to study the shock
induced combustion of advanced fuels. The system consists of a high
pressure shock tube interfaced to a gas chromatograph. The shock velocity
data and pressure profile is recorded on a LeCroy digital storage scope
then pulled from the scope using ProTERM running on a IIGS. The same
IIGS recordes the data from the gas chromatograph. A IIe on the system
operator's desk runs a set of spread sheets which help set up the initial
system conditions, record the particulars of each test, and convert the
shock velocity information into mean exposure temperaures and pressures.

The argument could be made that these same tasks can be done by other
computers (old and new) and they certainly can. But the Apple IIs are
available, paid for, and they do the job we need. If they didn't, we
wouldn't be using them.

-John