This document was kindly provided by Peter McClintock of the Department of Physics at Lancaster University.

From the preface:

'The Nicolet 1080 minicomputer/dataprocessor facilitates the acquisition (measurement and ensemble-averaging) of a signal from an experiment as well as for its subsequent analysis. Applied to a diversity of research purposes in Lancaster between 1976 and 1996, it led to more than 150 scientific publications involving 66 researchers in 10 countries – ranging from measurements of the Landau critical velocity for roton creation in superfluid ⁴He to the first observations of optimal fluctuational paths in nonlinear systems subject to noise.

These personal reflections provide summaries of the NIC-80’s unusual hardware and of how NIC-80 systems evolved in Lancaster, my introduction to the NIC-80, and descriptions of its use in practice. References are provided giving examples of Lancaster scientific publications reporting on research facilitated by the NIC-80. Descriptions of stochastics programmes and utilities that we wrote for the NIC-80 are provided in appendices.'

The document can be accessed here.