As the sale of the 2,000th MED-PC® license approaches, I have been reflecting on the evolution of MED-PC®, as well as the early days of MED Associates and the origins of our overall product development process. Here is a brief background.
My first exposure to experimental psychology was during my undergraduate studies at Villanova. I had completed my tour in the Navy and was studying Electrical Engineering; one of my friends, a former shipmate, was also at Villanova working as a graduate research assistant in the psychology department. My friend was expected to maintain the Lehigh Valley Electronics (LVE) and Foringer relay instrumentation for his advisor’s experiments. Unfortunately, in the Navy he had been a gauge repairman and did not know anything about electrical instrumentation. I became involved with helping him and his advisor maintain their experimental instrumentation. We later embarked on a project to build a 38-station operant conditioning control system using relays, and I became the student supervisor for a number of students.
After undergraduate school, I went to work for a medical telemetry group at United Technologies Corporation. In addition, during this time I was a volunteer engineer in the Cardiology Research department at Hahnemann Hospital. Somewhere around 1968-1969, I left United Technologies and got back into behavioral work, taking a job at LVE. I was responsible for the physiological instrumentation that they were distributing for a Japanese company, Nihon Koden, and was also involved in their behavioral line. At the time, LVE was manufacturing a behavioral computer (PDP-8) control system called ACT. Although I was not the primary engineer for this system, I took an interest in it. I liked the way it used block diagrams to define a procedure. However, it took me another 15 years to get back into computer behavior control systems.
LVE went through a number of changes in the late 1960s. Bill Jones was a co-worker of mine at LVE, and he left and started his own company, LVB. Later, I also left LVE and began working with Bill to develop a modular behavior system and printer. Eventually I purchased LVB from Bill, and took over the manufacturing of his computer-controlled system based on the TRS-80. We later adapted it for the Apple II. We supplied canned behavioral procedures that were mainly written in assembly language, but a set of Basic statements were provided to make it simpler for the user to read inputs (i.e. from a lever) or operate an output device such as a feeder or light. Using these statements, a researcher could write their own procedures in Basic.
In the 1980s the IBM PC became available, and we developed a new interface system for it. This included the DIG-720 and DIG-721 modules, which actually can still be used today with current computers. We were also interested in developing an improved software control system for the new modules. I was aware of the SKED® system but I preferred the block-diagram approach of the ACT system. But by then the developer of ACT, Jock Millison, had disappeared, and so there was no way to get him to create a similar system for us. At that time, Tom Tatham approached us about developing a system for our IBM PC interface using the SKED® state notation syntax.
I was a little skeptical at first because I thought that the ACT approach was more organized and clearer. Tom, however, convinced me that state notation syntax was much more intuitive to experimental psychologists than a block diagram approach. Furthermore, he indicated there were hundreds of people using SKED® systems on PDP computers and they would be natural customers for our system. At that time Tom Tatham was finishing his post doc at Temple. He then started teaching and during his first summer off (1987) he put in a Herculean effort to develop the MED-PC® system. The first commercial systems were shipped in the beginning of March 1988. We published a paper on this in 1989, Tatham, T. A. and Zurn, K. R. The MED-PC experimental apparatus programming system. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers 1989, 21 (2), 294-302. I will continue with the history in future newsletters.
Currently, at MED Associates, we continue to develop both procedures and applications relating to MED-PC®. We have up to 3 software engineers working on these projects at any given time. In addition, a good portion of our customer service engineer’s time is dedicated towards helping people to develop their own custom procedures. The MED-PC® system provides several options to researchers for running their experimental procedures, including
(1) use one of our many canned procedures, which requires very little effort
and no programming on the researcher’s part
(2) modify (or have us modify) an existing canned procedure
(3) develop a new procedure or contract us to develop it. A list of
currently available canned procedures can be found at
http://www.med-associates.com/software/software.htm.
For those who wish to get the most flexibility out of the system, or jump-start their MED-PC® skills, we began offering introductory and advanced MED-PC® programming workshops a few years ago. Typically these have been offered during the summer at our laboratory in Vermont, and in the fall to coincide with the Society for Neuroscience conference. This year, we will have our first MED-PC® training workshop held in conjunction with the annual Experimental Biology meeting. In addition, we have held short courses on specific topics such as self-administration, fear conditioning, and startle. These workshops and courses give researchers background in an area and provide supervised experience, with the goal of the participant being able to run a procedure on their own by the end of the course. The development of these courses is pretty exciting for us. It is still a relatively new endeavor and we feel it is a great benefit and opportunity for our customers and their research. MED Associates Inc.’s goal is to help researchers; now we can provide not only the tools and equipment for research, but also an opportunity to gain some of the necessary skills in a concise manner so researchers can move forward with their ‘real’ work.
The success of MED-PC® is evident by the hundred of articles published using it. See our citation section (http://www.med-associates.com/citations/citations.htm) or the current citations at the end of this newsletter.
