SPEC-DOC: A USER'S GUIDE TO SPECTROMETER SOFTWARE
SPEC is the name of the operating system designed to control the NMR spectrometers in lab. SPEC is actually one large program which handles many functions necessary to control each spectrometer. The program handles all I/O with peripheral devices such as the console ('terminal' or 'CRT'). The program carries out its operations by accepting commands which each invoke specific subroutines to perform their function. There are a total of 60 commands in SPEC, each carrying out a different function. Because so many commands make SPEC a very large program, not all of the program is core resident. Rather, each command calls in an overlay handler which loads into memory the appropriate overlay from the disk and begins execution of the command. Thus SPEC is an independent disk based operating system. The commands in SPEC are capable of operating the microprocessor based pulse programmer, starting and acquiring data from the spectrometer data acquisition system, storing data on disk and manipulating it mathematically, displaying and plotting data. All arithmetic operations within SPEC are performed on integers. Since the DATA GENERAL computers are 16 bit machines operating in two's complement mode, the integer range is +32767. Many of the mathematical operations of SPEC are done in double precision integer mode with the final result always scaled to the above range. For many of the commands, integer overflow is detected and reported as an error message. Overflowed points are set to +32767. SPEC accepts command input from the console or reads a string of commands previously entered on the disk. The later command structure is called a macro. Macros may be nested and may have constants passed to them at execution time, thus allowing for a powerful supercommand structure. Both forms of commands are discussed in the next section. SPEC is designed to run on a DATA GENERAL computer with 32K words of memory and a 10Mbyte hard disk system. There are minor differences between the various computers in lab which are discussed in one of the appendices. The disk systems consist of two. 5Mbyte platters, one fixed and one in a removable pack. While running SPEC, all disk I/O is with the fixed disk. All pulse programs, data records, phase box records, etc. reside on the fixed disk. Thus each disk drive is specific to one spectrometer. When running under RDOS (the DG operating system) these disk files may also be accessed. All the source listings of SPEC subroutines, the SPEC program library, and all supporting programs reside on one of the removable packs (labeled 'SPEC'). This pack will normally be in the drive but it is not required to run SPEC. It is required to run any of the supporting programs discussed in another chapter. This manual attempts to document the SPEC operating system and related topics. The following section discusses the general operation of SPEC including how to get into the program and how to issue commands. The following chapters discuss the commands in detail, operation of the microprocessor based pulse programmer, spectrometer peripherals, supporting programs, and how to create and load a 'TEMP' program. The appendices contain details on bootstrapping procedures, hardware specifics, a technical description of SPEC and how to change or recreate it, a description of microcode loading and the procedure for formatting floppy, disks and recreating RDGS.
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- Materials Sciences Division
- DOE Contract Number:
- DE-AC02-05CH11231
- OSTI ID:
- 937323
- Report Number(s):
- PUB-3033; TRN: US200819%%190
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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