From 1979 to 1985 I did some consulting with medical laboratory equpiment. A simula program, a few systems for managing blood test analysis equipment in hospital laboratories, including a two-processor client-server application implemented in FOCAL and BASIC.
At Karolinska Institutet I helped researchers in neurophysiology with computerized equipment. An ABC800 with a special 700K-memory expansion unit was programmed to read samples in real time from a measuring device and to present the data to the researcher interactively. I used awk-scripts on a unix machine to simplify the generation of BASIC code, more or less in the spirit of macro expansion.
I also worked on systems for acoustic analysis. A notable hack here was
a Z80-assembly-coded Fast Fourier Transform that allowed the 4 Mhz Z80
to analyse the frequency content of a sample up to 3000 Hz in 128 bands
in real time.
This solved the problem for the application to analysis of low frequency
noise. Comparatively a prototype version coded in BASIC was
100 times slower. The
user README file tells more.
Thomas Sjöland