… without a computer

If you’re a typical scientist, you spend a lot of time on the bench making measurements … and you don’t object to that at all. What you do mind is the ever-increasing amount of time that you must spend at the desk making the calculations that turn raw measurements into useful information. Some scientists still rely on slide rule and adding machine for this work; some have acquired a 9100 Computing Calculator and, in one economical stroke, cut their computational load by half or more. If you’re in the second group, we’d like to tell you of a new way to liberate even more of your time for scientific investigation, by letting your data gathering instruments communicate directly with a data processing system. You might think that this will necessarily involve you in the cost and complexity of a computer.
Not so. With the new HP Coupler / Controllers, you can now tie many measuring instruments to the 9100 and get reduced data directly … from more than 40 HP digital instruments including voltmeters, frequency and time counters, nuclear scalers, quartz thermometers and GC integrators.
You can even connect a teletypewriter to them and get a complete report of your experiment, formatted as you like it and prepared automatically on a typewritten sheet, punched paper tape or even on the calculator’s X-Y plotter. We’d be happy to send youbulletins that explain how you can expand the capabilities of your 9100 for on-line data handling and even for automatic test systems. Write for “Calculator-Based Instrumentation Systems.” Couplers are priced at $1275 or $1875; interfaces cost $450 to $1775 per device.

Hewlett-Packard, 1507 Page Mill Road,
Palo Alto, California 94304.
In Europe: 1217 Meyrin-Geneva, Switzerland.

(from SCIENCE, VOL. 171)