Earlier we developed an electronic interface system which linked the analog signals from the four preamplifiers of the flow cytometer to the microcomputer. This system collected, processed, and conditioned the analog signals before acquisition by the microcomputer, and effectively solved the problem of interfacing asynchronous and synchronous data conversion, acquisition, and storage. We found that when analog signals occurred simultaneously with the reset of the integrators, only partial integrations were obtained, which skewed the cell histogram. A trigger hold-off circuit in the analog detector section eliminated this problem. During this period, we have studied the timing of the various interface and computer tasks in detail to identify where improvements in data throughput were possible.
