NODAS: the network-oriented data acquisition system for the medical environment

A network-oriented distributed computing system designed for the medical, multi-laboratory environment is described. The development of this network was motivated by the need for a real-time computing system which offers the speed and responsiveness of a dedicated processor and the convenience and cost-effectiveness of resource sharing. The system, a star configured network, utilizes a DECsystem-10 time-sharing system as its host and small memory-only PDP-11 processors as satellites. Program development for the satellite processors can be performed on the host in a higher-level language developed especially for the network. Also present are such network capabilities as downline loading and remote file manipulation.