A High-Speed CAMAC Data Acquisition System for PDP-11

This paper describes a high-speed data acquisition system for a PDP-11 running under the RSX-11M operating system. It has been used by several high-energy physics experiments at Fermilab. The system consists of several coordinated tasks which acquire data through a CAMAC interface, log data to magnetic tape, supply data to independent monitoring and analysis tasks (such as RSXMULTI), and perform control functions. A data buffer extending beyond the 18-bit address space of the PDP-11 is implemented using Konelar bank-switchable memory. Supported configurations range from small systems with single data acquisition and analysis tasks on the same processor, to large multi-processor systems with data acquisition on several PDPs and analysis on separate PDPs or VAXs.