Control system for the NBS microtron accelerator

As various subsystems of the National Bureau of Standards/Los Alamos racetrack microtron accelerator are being brought on-line, we are gaining experience with some of the innovations implemented in the control system. Foremost among these are the joystick-based operator controls, the hierarchical distribution of control system intelligence, and the independent secondary stations, permitting sectional stand-alone operation. The result of the distributed database philosophy and parallel data links has been very fast data updates, permitting joystick interaction with system elements. The software development was greatly simplified by using the hardware arbitration of several parallel processors in the Multibus system to split the software tasks into independent modules.