Equipment for linking the Auto-Analyzer to an off-line computer.

The increasing demand for laboratory investigation of patients has created many new problems for the pathologist, not least of which is the difficulty of handling all the data involved.Manual data processing systems are still operating satisfactorily at present but there are sound reasons for considering the use of automatic data pro- cessing in the future (Flynn, 1966).To enable data to be handled entirely by mechanical or electronic means a language is required which can be written, recognized and reproduced without the aid of the human eye.In the punched hole language which is commonly used for this purpose there are only two symbols, a hole or no hole, and different numbers and combinations of these symbols are used to represent each 'character', that is each letter, digit, or sign.The machines detect where holes are present and convert the information into electrical impulses.Getting information into suitable form for machine handling represents one of the major obstacles to the use of automatic data processing systems.Of the two steps that are involved, namely, the collection of signifi- cant data and the coding of such data, the second presents the greater difficulty and is often dependent on specially trained personnel.Because a high proportion of our analyses are now performed with the Technicon AutoAnalyzer, we have concentrated in the first instance on devising equipment which will automatically collect data from these instruments in machine-readable form.We have collaborated in designing a suitable analogueto-digital converter which when attached to the Auto-Analyzer recorders automatically finds the peaks during the run of analyses and records their height on punched paper-tape ready for direct computer entry.In this paper we describe the equipment and report on our experience with it; preliminary accounts have already been published (Flynn, 1965a and b).Details of how a computer has been programmed to process the data captured by the analogue-to-digital converter will be described else- where.