Press Art: Poets and their Printing Machines

Inspired by technology, twentieth-century poets have exploited its instruments through a medium which may be called "press art." They have circumvented what Marshall McLuhan perceives to be the inimical influence of the printing press, to retransform mechanical operations into artisanal handwork and thus to restore originality to products of the press. Language, and the process of its use, has been rendered visible through their innovations. This is shown through an examination of esthetic predispositions and procedures that have entered into the creation of the visual poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire, Pierre Albert-Birot, Pierre Garnier, and John Furnival, and through an assessment of these artists’ roles with respect to the secondary production level involving printers or printing machines that enabled the creation and their works’ status as "original" within this context of collaboration and mechanical reproduction

A LOCAL NETWORK FOR LABORATORY AUTOMATION AND DATA COLLECTION.

This dissertation describes LABNET, a loosely-coupled network of small computers for laboratory automation and data collection. The network comprises two parts: RAPNET, the local-network operating-system-like software, and Real-time MICRODARE, an interactive language for programming automation and data-collection tasks. RAPNET provides the framework upon which application-level programs like MICRODARE execute. In addition to the usual file services and other miscellaneous system services normally supplied by a single-CPU operating system, RAPNET provides link-level message facilities, program control, and a virtual channel system. There is a means for coordinated application-level program intercommunication, the pseudo-link; pseudo-links are the means by which programs running in different CPUs or in the same CPU may be connected. To the application-level program, a pseudo-link looks just like a file or device. Real-time MICRODARE supplies an interactive programming capability which uses the facilities of RAPNET to enable a programmer to do distributed program systems for automation, simulation, and data collection. MICRODARE consists of an interactive BASIC-like job-control language, and a compiled fast-task language. The job-control language permits time and event dependent scheduling of automation and data-collection program segments. The fast-task language does simulation, signal-processing, data-collection, and control tasks at close-to-assembly-language speeds

Reviewing real-time performance of nuclear reactor safety systems

The purpose of this paper is to recommend regulatory guidance for reviewers examining real-time performance of computer-based safety systems used in nuclear power plants. Three areas of guidance are covered in this report. The first area covers how to determine if, when, and what prototypes should be required of developers to make a convincing demonstration that specific problems have been solved or that performance goals have been met. The second area has recommendations for timing analyses that will prove that the real-time system will meet its safety-imposed deadlines. The third area has description of means for assessing expected or actual real-time performance before, during, and after development is completed. To ensure that the delivered real-time software product meets performance goals, the paper recommends certain types of code-execution and communications scheduling. Technical background is provided in the appendix on methods of timing analysis, scheduling real-time computations, prototyping, real-time software development approaches, modeling and measurement, and real-time operating systems

Diagnostic control, data acquisition and data processing at MFTF-B (Mirror Fusion Test Facility)

Diagnostic instruments at the Mirror Fusion Test Facility (MFTF-B) are operated by a distributed computer system which provides an integrated control, data acquisition and data processing interface. Instrument control settings, operator inputs and lists of data to be acquired are combined with data acquired by instrument data recorders, to be used downstream by data processing codes; data processing programs are automatically informed of operator control and setpoint actions without operator intervention. The combined diagnostic control and results presentation interface is presented to experimentalist users by a network of high-resolution graphics workstations. Control coordination, data processing and database management are handled by a shared-memory network of 32-bit super minicomputers. Direct instrument control, data acquisition, data packaging and instrument status monitoring are performed by a network of dedicated local control microcomputers