PC12 by

Artronix Artronix Incorporated began in 1970 and has roots in a project in a computer science class at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri, St Louis. The class designed, built and tested a 12-bit minicomputer, which later evolved ...

was a

minicomputer A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a type of general-purpose computer mostly developed from the mid-1960s, built significantly smaller and sold at a much lower price than mainframe computers . By 21st century-standards however, a mini is ...

built with 7400-series TTL technology and ferrite core memory. Computers were manufactured at the Artronix facility in suburban St. Louis, Missouri. The instruction set architecture was adapted from the LINC, the only significant change was to expand addressable memory to 4K, which required addition of an origin register. It was an accumulator machine with 12-bit addresses to manipulate 12-bit data. Later versions included "origin registers" that were used to extend the addressability of memory. Arithmetic was

ones' complement The ones' complement of a binary number is the value obtained by inverting (flipping) all the bits in the Binary number, binary representation of the number. The name "ones' complement" refers to the fact that such an inverted value, if added t ...

. For

mass storage In computing, mass storage refers to the storage of large amounts of data in a persisting and machine-readable fashion. In general, the term ''mass'' in ''mass storage'' is used to mean ''large'' in relation to contemporaneous hard disk drive ...

it had a LINCtape dual unit. It also used a

Tektronix Tektronix, Inc., historically widely known as Tek, is an American company best known for manufacturing test and measurement devices such as oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and video and mobile test protocol equipment. Originally an independent c ...

screen with tube memory and an ADC/ DAC to capture and display images. There was an optional

plotter A plotter is a machine that produces vector graphics drawings. Plotters draw lines on paper using a pen, or in some applications, use a knife to cut a material like Polyvinyl chloride, vinyl or leather. In the latter case, they are sometimes k ...

to draw the results. To speed up the calculations it had a separate

floating point unit A floating-point unit (FPU), numeric processing unit (NPU), colloquially math coprocessor, is a part of a computer system specially designed to carry out operations on floating-point numbers. Typical operations are addition, subtraction, multipli ...

that interfaced like any other

peripheral A peripheral device, or simply peripheral, is an auxiliary hardware device that a computer uses to transfer information externally. A peripheral is a hardware component that is accessible to and controlled by a computer but is not a core compo ...

. It ran an

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

LAP6-PC with support for

assembly language In computing, assembly language (alternatively assembler language or symbolic machine code), often referred to simply as assembly and commonly abbreviated as ASM or asm, is any low-level programming language with a very strong correspondence bet ...

and Fortran programming and usually came with end user software for Radiation Treatment Planning (RTP), for use by a

radiation therapist A radiation therapist, therapeutic radiographer or radiotherapist is an allied health professional who works in the field of radiation oncology. Radiation therapists plan and administer radiation treatments to cancer patients in most Western co ...

or radiation oncologist, and Hospital Patient Records. Software for implant

dosimetry Radiation dosimetry in the fields of health physics and radiation protection is the measurement, calculation and assessment of the ionizing radiation dose absorbed by an object, usually the human body. This applies both internally, due to ingest ...

was available for the PC12. With extended hardware it became a multiuser system running

MUMPS MUMPS ("Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System"), or M, is an imperative, high-level programming language with an integrated transaction processing key–value database. It was originally developed at Massachusetts Gen ...

. Latter additions included an 8"

floppy disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, a diskette, or a disk) is a type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a ...

and hard disk of larger capacity. The PC12 initially controlled the

brain scanner (computed axial tomography), but this was for prototyping. The PC12 was also the core of an ultrasound system and a gamma camera system. The PC12 was eventually superseded by the "Modulex" system built by

around the 16-bit Lockheed SUE processor, roughly around 1976. The PC12 continued in production, but was phased out over time. Sites which used the Artronix PC12 included the Lutheran Hospital Cancer Center in

Moline, Illinois Moline ( ) is a city in Rock Island County, Illinois, United States. With a population of 42,985 in the 2020 census, it is the largest city in Rock Island County and the List of municipalities in Illinois, ninth-most populous in Illinois outside ...

, where it was used to store the medical records of patients undergoing treatment for cancer. A 1974 paper describes the use of a PC12 as a frontend to an IBM 360 mainframe in radiation therapy, in which the PC12 acted as the user interface while the mainframe is used to perform complex calculations.

References

External links

* Minicomputers {{mini-compu-stub