AtariLab

AtariLab

AtariLab Starter Set
Original author(s)	Priscilla Laws, David Egolf
Developer(s)	Dickinson College, Atari Inc.
Initial release	1983
Platform	Atari 8-bit

AtariLab was a laboratory instrumentation system and related computer software for the Atari 8-bit family intended to be used in a high school science classroom setting. The concept was developed by Priscilla Laws, a physics professor at Dickinson College, and developed in partnership with Atari. The AtariLab Starter Set with the Temperature Module was released in late 1983, and followed by the add-on Light Module in February 1984. Several other were modules planned for future release.

The system was just coming onto the market when Atari was sold to Jack Tramiel and all development on the system ended. By this time the development company organized by Laws had ported the system to the Commodore 64 and Apple II. Small numbers of the Atari and C64 versions were sold commercially, but the Apple II version was never completed. The company went on to produce a professional version of the system for the IBM PC platform, which sold tens of thousands of examples and was a common piece of equipment into the 1990s.

AtariLab came about after Laws saw a thermistor dipped into ice water being sampled and graphed on an expensive laboratory system. Instead of having to periodically sample a thermometer and then use the data to produce a graph, the computer was creating this in real time, and "it blew me away." Considering a common experiment carried out by students, producing a cooling curve for hot water, the system would reduce perhaps 15 to 20 minutes of work to a few moments. This would free up so much time the students would be able to carry out multiple experiments in a typical lab period, perhaps testing the effects of insulation, or producing curves for different materials in a single sitting.

Laws began using similar devices in her teaching lab, and as Laws's son owned an Atari 8-bit computer, began development of a recording and graphing system on that platform. The Atari was ideal for the task for two reasons. One was because it had a high-resolution graphics mode that was, at the time of introduction, one of the best displays available and easily accessed through Atari BASIC. Another was that the engineers had equipped it with joystick ports of unusual flexibility, which allowed them to be used as a general purpose voltage sampling input. Combining a simple sampling board with software written by a 15-year-old middle-school student, David Egolf, the basic concept was quickly developed.