CAMAC/PDP 11-45 coupler

The complex experimental devices used in high energy physics require the use of minicomputers. The latter are coupled to the detectors using the CAMAC standard which has been adopted by the majority of high energy physics laboratories, much to the ease of international collaboration. The performance of industrially available interfaces having shown to be inadequate, the DPhPE has undertaken the development of a multibranche CAMAC/PDP 11-45 coupler. This system can control up to 49 crates shared out between 7 branches. It consists of a programmed channel and up to three high speed (556 Kwords/second) automatic channels. The four channels can work simultaneously through time sharing. The coupler includes a LAM handling system. The correspondent software has been developed simultaneously: the monitor is an extended version of the RT 11 system supplied by the manufacturer. This interface has been used so far in five experiments on the CERN PS and SPS. Besides this publication, intended to give a description of the coupler, a user's utilisation manuel exists in English