COMPUTER UNIT
U.S. Gift To University
(N.Z. Press Association) AUCKLAND, June 10. A tiny “memory unit” about the siz# of a cigar box, yet capable of counting up to 256 million, forms the key part of a new electronic analyser for the phvsics department at Auckland University. The £6BOO instrument, which was unpacked in Auckland yesterday, has been given to the university by the United States Government, under its “Atoms for Peace” programme. Called a “multi-channel pulse-height analyser,” it takes the pulses generated in radiation counters and “sorts them out for size,” splitting them up into a maximum of 256 groups, according to their intensity. To irreverent physicists, the new machine is a “kicksorter”—tor sorting and counting electric pulses at rates of up to 30,000 a second. As the pulses are counted, for a pre-set time, the number in each group is stored in the tiny magnetic-core memory, and can be printed out on a graph or electric printer, or displayed on a cathode ray tube.
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Bibliographic details
Press, Volume C, Issue 29537, 12 June 1961, Page 15
Word Count
166COMPUTER UNIT Press, Volume C, Issue 29537, 12 June 1961, Page 15
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