In the last newsletter I began talking about the history of behavioral instrumentation companies and my involvement. I will continue in this issue. For about a year and a half I worked in the Telemedics Department of United Technologies, doing clinical and research medical telemetry. Then I returned to Villanova for a semester to finish my graduate studies in electrical engineering. This was when I began working part time at Lehigh Valley Electronics (LVE). It was a real exciting time (1967-1968) for me. The first affordable (less than $10K) mini computers (Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-8 series) were coming on the market. And we had one in our lab at LVE with 8K of memory (wow) and an ASR-33 Teletype Terminal. You could write and debug your Basic programs on-line. Great excitement for a tech nerd. Contrast this with programming in school. To do a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) in Fortran, I had filled a large box of punch cards. Students had a very low priority on the mainframe - you would drop off the punch cards in the afternoon and they would be processed at night. One day per bug. Since I was working part time, I would stay in Allentown two nights a week and then go back to Villanova. So what did I do at night? You guessed it, I was writing assembler programs for the PDP-8.
When I finished my course work at Villanova I went full time at LVE. At that time LVE was in a transition period. To the workers it looked like LVE was in an expansion mode, but I think the owner was in a “sell the company” mode. I was sent with the Director of Research and Development, Gunther Reith, Ph.D., to Palo Alto in order to establish an R&D and sales office. Our ambitious goal was to develop a biomedical acquisition system to acquire data from EEG machines or polygraph chart recorders. The data would be stored on tape and inputted to an IBM System 360. The system, and the sales efforts, were failures and the office was closed in a year or so. I returned to Allentown to work in the LVE R&D Lab and Gunter Reith left the company for a faculty position at the University of British Columbia. LVE still had an extensive R&D and sales force. John Coulbourn was in charge of new product development. Bill Jones was the Assistant to the President for developing an automated teaching machine and a Nihon Koden oscilloscope camera that was similar to the Grass camera. Skip Mickey was in charge of the Jock Millenson ACT behavioral control system (See Medlines Issue 6).
Joel Hoffner helped Bill Jones and did overall electronic design. Byron Zerphy worked with me in electronic design. He later left to form Coulbourn Instruments with John Coulbourn. In addition to electronic design of physiological behavioral instruments, I was in charge of coordinating the Nihon Koden physiological line with our two Japanese engineers.
About a year and half after I began working at LVE, the company was sold to BRS. The owner of LVE, Al Simpson, left for Japan to pursue other interests. I , and a number of others, had left LVE just prior to the sale. I started MED Associates. Bill Jones left to form the LVB Corporation. Paul Donahue, originally the overall sales manager and later in charge of export sales at LVE, moved on to Coulbourn Instruments. He eventually became the General Manager of World Precision Instruments (WPI). So at least three companies were spinoffs of LVE - MED Associates, Coulbourn Instruments, and LVB.
Around this time I also met my wife, Jane. John Coulbourn knew Jane through some friends. Jane knew probably everyone in town, and was a real organizer. When I returned from Palo Alto, John called her up and said, “I’ve got a fellow who’s coming back to the area, could you set him up with someone?” She figured she’d check me out before she passed me along. We got married about two years later. Jane also introduced John to his first wife.
Product Updates
Our Video Freeze System (MED-VFC-NIR) continues to have a good response from the research community. A number of labs have adopted it in place of hand scoring. We are contemplating a major upgrade and are soliciting suggestions as to the new features desired. You can contact us with suggestions via the Researcher’s Round Table on our website or by clicking on the link on our home page (www.med-associates.com) or forward them to our Director of Research and Development Gerry Herrera, Ph.D. (gerry@med-associates.com or 802-527-2343).
The ENV-044 Low Profile Wireless Mouse Running Wheel is becoming a best seller for people doing Circadian work and general activity measurement. The entire wheel/transmitter apparatus is small enough to fit inside many individually ventilated mouse home cages. You have no wires to connect - your data is transmitted directly to the hub. At $200 per wireless running wheel and one hub can service 40 wireless running wheels (hub price $795), it is very economical.
We have been shipping SoftCr Pro: Online Cumulative Recorder Graphical Software (SOF-722). This is a major upgrade of our SoftCr Cumulative Recorder software. SoftCr Pro allows you to monitor multiple boxes online without any additional hardware. Check your boxes while you’re in your office. Or at the beach. It is also a very good value at $300 for a single license upgrade, (see our web site under New Products).
For people doing work with a Water Maze, we offer an On-Demand (“Atlantis”) Platform (Mouse ENV-595M or Rat ENV-595R) . This unit can be controlled by most existing software. It is value priced at $995. The On-Demand platform stays deep in the water until it is triggered to rise into place for the rodent. The signal can either be sent from software, or triggered by hand. This method is described by Buresova (1985) and Spooner et al (1994).
Sincerely,
Karl R. Zurn, M.E.E.
