SLAC SPEAR - "Mark I"
An experiment I worked with as an "undergraduate helper" while at school at UC Berkeley. I'm not sure what its name was, Mark II was the detector upgrade that followed after I left for graduate school, thus the quotes.
As an undergraduate I worked for Gerson Goldhaber and joined the experiment just before its marvelous discovery of the J/Ψ particle which sparked a "revolution" in particle physics.
SPEAR was a remarkably productive machine, the Stanford Positron Electron Accelerating Ring, was built out of the operating budget at SLAC (which would no longer be possible in the "modern" DOE). It not only "discovered" the J/Ψ but also a host of other particles containing the c-quark, c for charm, a QuantumChromoDynamics (QCD) flavor and perhaps equally surprising, the τ-lepton, the heaviest (so far) cousin of the electron (the muon being the third).
This machine was also used as a synchrotron light source (the first?) but certainly a "generation zero" facility. This spawned a global, huge light source "industry" where material scientists can go to study the properties of an enormous array of materials, The current Linear Coherent Light Source at SLAC, is a result of SPEAR's legacy (and both "re-purposed" machines formally used in High Energy Physics).
One of my tasks working with Gerson was to run jobs at on the SLAC computers and transfer the image output to LBL. I did this while sitting in front of a Textronix terminal, using the ARPAnet...
As an undergraduate I worked for Gerson Goldhaber and joined the experiment just before its marvelous discovery of the J/Ψ particle which sparked a "revolution" in particle physics.
SPEAR was a remarkably productive machine, the Stanford Positron Electron Accelerating Ring, was built out of the operating budget at SLAC (which would no longer be possible in the "modern" DOE). It not only "discovered" the J/Ψ but also a host of other particles containing the c-quark, c for charm, a QuantumChromoDynamics (QCD) flavor and perhaps equally surprising, the τ-lepton, the heaviest (so far) cousin of the electron (the muon being the third).
This machine was also used as a synchrotron light source (the first?) but certainly a "generation zero" facility. This spawned a global, huge light source "industry" where material scientists can go to study the properties of an enormous array of materials, The current Linear Coherent Light Source at SLAC, is a result of SPEAR's legacy (and both "re-purposed" machines formally used in High Energy Physics).
One of my tasks working with Gerson was to run jobs at on the SLAC computers and transfer the image output to LBL. I did this while sitting in front of a Textronix terminal, using the ARPAnet...
ARPAnet image from the web...
https://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cybergeography/atlas/arpanet_june1974_large.gif
The terminal was in Building 50 (the best office view I ever had!) and I talked to the Stanford computer system on which I presume we were doing the data analysis. In those days we were charged for the computer time we used. While showing members of Gerson's research team this, Jerry Abrahams asked "how much does it cost?" When I told him (it was relatively expensive) he quipped "a picture is worth considerably more than a thousand words."
That was the beginning of what we know to be the internet today.
That was the beginning of what we know to be the internet today.