Evolution of the racetrack microtron control system

The racetrack microtron (RTM) control system evolved around a standard bus structured (Multibus) distributed intelligence design that is sufficiently versatile to permit additions to the machine, and sufficiently RTM oriented to be relatively simple and within initial budget projections. The choice of a rather undistinguished eight bit processor made available a vast collection of inexpensive, well debugged utility and library software. The dual processor secondary station greatly simplified the software by taking advantage of the Multibus master slave serial bus arbitration protocol. Many commercial boards are available for use in this system, as needed; but religious adherence to a commercial only philosophy was sacrificed where the system performance and simplicity could be thereby enhanced. The operator controls are interrupt driven, providing best response time and system performance.