Bob Glusick
August 6, 2004
MedStar Nuclear Scan Display
April, 1980
While everything went wrong politically on the CT display job, there was some technical merit in it, and eventually Medical Systems requested a similar item for their nuclear scanner. Time had passed, and 16K dynamic RAM chips were standard on many computers. Complex chip multiplexing gave way to straight forward recurring readout, and simpler pulse drive distribution. MedStar required a 3 channel color display as well as a cursor / alphanumeric notation plane. Bill Hoefer designed a table lookup scheme to replace the real time digital arithmetic and the digital cursor. A few years later, almost every computer had a VGA video system on a chip doing these functions!. The whole thing was spec'ed to run in a Data General chassis as shown. The backplane on that beast was something else to control!!! Eventually MedStar morphed into the Star Nuclear scanner, and moved to Med Systems facility in England for production. They in turn got the nod to build the next rev display system for the first generation MRI scanner in '83 ...
I got to know Dave Roth, and much of the senior digital design staff at Med Systems very well, and each of us flew back and forth almost every other week.
