The paper describes how the Computer Center of the University of Nottingham succeeded in building a very inexpensive workstation for the Department of Surgery at the University Hospital. The particular application is a study to screen individuals for cancer of the colon, with the hope of detecting the cancer early enough to permit a high chance of survival.

The requirements of the system are data storage and analysis on a large mainframe; data entry on an intelligent terminal, using formatted screens; and fast, secure data transmission (not going through student-used lines and computers). The solution is to use the university’s ICL 2976, with a private 200 Mbyte exchangeable disk and a BBC microcomputer as the terminal in the physician’s office. Since the BBC is a “dumb,” asynchronous terminal, the Computer Center developed two EPROMs--one of which enables the BBC to act as a host/network-independent screen editor with graphical display capability. The other enables the BBC to receive, process, and transmit entire screens of information. These functions are driven by FORTRAN 77 and Assembly programs residing in the ICL 2976 and triggered from the BBC by an automatic logon procedure.

The transmission route is from the BBC to a MICOM port selector, to a JNTPAD providing an X25 link, to a Campus Switch, and then to the ICL 2976. This route allows a complete disk of 175 Kbytes to be transferred in about 35 minutes (including a per-record checksum on all 700 records). It also allows the transmission in the opposite direction of letters and mailing labels to a DRE 8930 printer attached to the BBC. Typically, 600 letters and 2400 labels can be produced in 41-2- hours.

The strength of the paper is in the description of the trials and errors made by the Computer Center staff until they arrived at the present configuration. All the considerations and decisions are clearly laid out. Anyone contemplating designing such a system would do well to read the paper so as to avoid making the same mistakes. End users who are having such a system built for them should show this paper to their computing staff.