Microsystems the Microprocessor in the Biological Laboratory

The use of microprocessors in the biological laboratory is a logical result of the evolution of computer use in the biomedical sciences. In 1963, H. K. Hartline and Floyd Ratliff, working at Rockefeller University in New York City, hooked up a CDC 160A computer as a generalpurpose laboratory instrument for data acquisition during their experiments on vision.
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For stimulus control, they used a digital programmer constructed from commercially available discrete transistor logic circuits.
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The work in the Hartline-Ratliff laboratory was a continuation of earlier work done by Hartline on inhibitory interaction in the horseshoe crab's eye, for which Hartline shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1966, with Wald and Granit.
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