Abstract:
In the past decade computer technology and design (both analog and digital) and the development of low cost linear and digital I integrated circuitry' have advanced at an almost unbelievable rate. Thus computers and quantitative electronic circuitry are now readily available to chemists, physicists, and other scientific groups interested in instrument design.
'' The computer and. integrated circuitry are revolution-izing measurement and instrumentation in science'.
In generals chemist, physicists and others have just begun to realize and understand the potential of computer applications to their respective research and quantitative measurement. The basic applications are in the areas of data acquisition and reduction, simulation and instrumentat-ion (on-line data processing and experimental control and/or optimization in real t,ime)
For years, while much of the spectroscopic instru-mentation market was ignoring the inroads being made into the laboratory by minicomputers and now by microprocessors 9 individual researchers were deeply involved in the making of laboratory 'workhorse' instruments and powerful laborat-ory computers. Infrared opectrophotometry has long had the reputation of being only semiquantitative at best.
