Time-Sharing a Disk Memory for On-Line Spectrum Accumulation from Many Nuclear Pulse-Height Analyzers

Several pulse-height analyzers time-share a large disk memory for on-line accumulation of sorted spectra. The system is controlled by a PDP-8 computer which performs a two-level hardware-software sort on the data in real time. The computer dynamically allocates storage to incoming events and schedules disk accesses to achieve high sorting rates under a variety of counting loads.