Yes, we had about 100 Amigas at SLAC at one time. Most of them were Amiga 500's which were used as intelligent graphical terminals to access the linear accelerator control system. The rest were scientific workstations, mostly A2000's and later A3000's for scientists. Even the director of SLAC had an Amiga. An Amiga 3000T was used as a data acquisition system, connected to CAMAC hardware, for one of the experiments.
Yes, the accelerator really is straight in that sense. My back of the envelope calculation says it's about 20 cm deeper in the center than at the start and end. I'm not really sure if the floor of the building is that straight, though, and it doesn't really have to be - it would be really hard to make that happen in a single pour of concrete (according to my info they did in fact pour the entire 2 miles in a single pour, hundreds of cement trucks were lined up). The accelerator is mounted on a "strongback" which is a pipe some 50 cm in diameter. This strongback was aligned, by laser, to be straight. During the Loma Prieta earthquake the alignment was thrown off by a couple of inches, and there was an extensive realignment procedure in the months following.
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Yes, we had about 100 Amigas at SLAC at one time. Most of them were Amiga 500's which were used as intelligent graphical terminals to access the linear accelerator control system. The rest were scientific workstations, mostly A2000's and later A3000's for scientists. Even the director of SLAC had an Amiga. An Amiga 3000T was used as a data acquisition system, connected to CAMAC hardware, for one of the experiments.
Yes, the accelerator really is straight in that sense. My back of the envelope calculation says it's about 20 cm deeper in the center than at the start and end. I'm not really sure if the floor of the building is that straight, though, and it doesn't really have to be - it would be really hard to make that happen in a single pour of concrete (according to my info they did in fact pour the entire 2 miles in a single pour, hundreds of cement trucks were lined up). The accelerator is mounted on a "strongback" which is a pipe some 50 cm in diameter. This strongback was aligned, by laser, to be straight. During the Loma Prieta earthquake the alignment was thrown off by a couple of inches, and there was an extensive realignment procedure in the months following.