Here you will find pointers to a small number of historic fragments concerning the Nodal programming language. Nodal was initally designed to control the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) The construction work started around 1972, and the SPS was commissioned in 1975. At that time it was controlled by a distributed computer system. The Nord-10 (soon to be followed by Nord-100) computers were supplied by Norsk Data, Oslo. The equipment for the data communication links was supplied by TITN, Paris. The application programs were written in the Nodal language. The language provided facilities for data acquisition, human interaction devices and graphic display.
With the advent of microprocessors, scaled-down Nodal versions were ported to Pace (from National Semiconductor, Santa Clara), to mc68000 (from Motorola, Schaumburg) and possibly also to other architectures. The Touch Terminal which served as an operator interface to a Nord-100 harnessed with Nodal, also incorporated Nodal on a mc68000. Notably, this was the setup that helped Simon van der Meer in his work on the CERN Antiproton Accumulator (AA). Work which qualified him for his share of the 1984 Nobel price in physics.
The original versions of Nodal were written in assembly code of the target computer architecture. Macros somewhat eased porting to other architectures. An early port to Modula-2 was attempted, but with the advent of Unix a pragmatic port to the C-language was completed.
Subsequent additions greatly enlarged the available features. For control purposes, the ultimate version was prepared for the CERN Proton Synchrotron (PS). The language was maintained at CERN, at least until 1998. For obscure reasons, the language fell out of favor in accelerator control; much to the advantage of other, presumably more structured and object oriented languages. With that transition, the ability for the equipment groups to program the applications themselves, without engaging professional software engineers, was effectively sacrificed.
Versions of Nodal are known to have been ported to at least the following computer systems:
| Title / Subject | Brief Description of the Topic | Publication Reference / Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Nodal and Controls | Publications related to Nodal and Controls. | Reference to Nodal and Controls on the CERN Document Server. |
| The man page for the PS Nodal | This is a comprehensive discription of the functions and features of Nodal made available in the CERN Proton Synchrotron Accelerator (PS) . | This is a Web-a-lized version of the man-page found in the Nodal C-Source Distribution. |
| Nodal - the second life of the accelerator control language | This paper describes the C implementation of Nodal. | CERN-PS-93-52-CO Presented at ICALEPS, Berlin, October 1993 |
| Nodal Functions for the PC-AT Xenix | This is a bare-bone list of the user functions available on the PC-AT Xenix version of Nodal. | Web-a-lized from: SPS/ACC/Note/87-8 LEP Controls Note 81 |
| Nodal for the PC-AT Xenix | This is a guide for the user of Nodal on the IBM PC/AT running Xenix. It is an addendum to the suite of Nodal related manuals with the specific operational details of Xenix Nodal. | SPS/ACC/Note 87-7 LEP Controls Note 80 |
| Timing: mc68000 versus IBM PC-AT | This document shows a comparison of the Nodal execution speed on the Motorola mc68000 and the IBM PC-AT, vintage 1986. | Private communication 1986 |
| Proposal for the LEP Control System | This is Michael C. Crowley-Milling's proposal for the control system of the CERN Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP). | CERN-LEP/DI/83-20 |
| Nodal Course Material | This is course material (in the French tongue) which was used to train the SPS operators working in the main control room. | CERN/SPS/83-24 (EBS) |
| A Multi-Processor Multi-Task Control Structure for the CERN SPS | Chris Saltmarsh elaborates on the future software structure to control accelerators. | SPS/AOP/Note/83-8/0325T |
| Evolution of Control Systems for Accelerators | Michael C. Crowley-Milling exposes his view on accelerator contol in 1982. | 7th CERN School of Computing, Zinal, Switzerland, 29 Aug - 11 Sep 1982 |
| Evolution of Control Systems for Accelerators | This reference contains a description of the Touch Terminal | Topical Conference on the Application of Microprocessors to High-energy Physics Experiments, Geneva, Switzerland, 4 - 6 May 1981 |
| NODAL in the Touch Terminal | This note describes the entry and return conditions for the subroutines which make up the Nodal interpreter as implemented in the Independent Crate Controller (ICC) for the Touch Terminal. | SPS/AOP/CO/Note/79-29 |
Sessions: | Course material presented to the SPS Operations team, prepared by C.G. Harrison/CERN | Related Notes:
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| THE NODAL SYSTEM FOR THE SPS - 1974 | In this report M.C. Crowley-Milling, J.T. Hyman and G.C. Shering present a description of the Nodal language as it was originally set up for the control system of the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) then under construction. | Lab II-CO/74-2-EN |
| LE SYSTEME NODAL POUR LE SPS - 1974 | Le document ci-dessus présenté en français. | Lab II-CO/74-2-FR |
| NODAL User Functions Short Descriptions and Parameter Formats | Brief specifications are given of all Nodal user functions that were available at the console/display computer system in Block 1, lab. 2-A17, in 1974. | Lab II-CO/CE/Int. Note/PF/74-24 |
2017-09-24 (psa) some lost references replaced, HTML simplified 2007-11-16 (psa) corrections prompted by Alastair Bland 2007-11-15 (psa) initial compilation of retrieved documents