Data Acquisition History - From Strip Chart Recorders to Digital DAQ

Most people are familiar with the concept of data recording. If you’ve seen films from the early days of NASA, you might have seen banks of paper-based chart recorders, endlessly streaming out squiggly lines. These were the days before graphical video displays. Paper was the easiest way to provide a real-time display of measured signals. You might also have seen EEG, EKG machines, also with paper outputs, which display and commit to paper medical readings, as well as seismographs, which draw lines to represent earthquake data. In the earliest days of testing, readings from meters had to be written by hand onto paper, and then the results analyzed off-line. Eventually, technology allowed measurements to be recorded on tape, and then onto a continuous chart using a pen. Magnetic tape and paper-based chart recorders were the dominant methods of recording scientific data until the 1980s. We consider tape and chart paper recorders to be the precursors of today’s digital data acquisition devices.

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