Microsystems the Microprocessor in the Biological Laboratory

The use of microprocessors in the biological laboratory is a logical result of the evolution of computer use in the biomedical sciences. In 1963, H. K. Hartline and Floyd Ratliff, working at Rockefeller University in New York City, hooked up a CDC 160A computer as a generalpurpose laboratory instrument for data acquisition during their experiments on vision.¹For stimulus control, they used a digital programmer constructed from commercially available discrete transistor logic circuits.²The work in the Hartline-Ratliff laboratory was a continuation of earlier work done by Hartline on inhibitory interaction in the horseshoe crab´s eye, for which Hartline shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1966, with Wald and Granit.³