Quality Software & Analysis: Untethering Data Collection
When quality data collection first hit the shop floor in the late 1970s it did so in the form of ASCII terminals connected to a main-frame or minicomputers. These terminals were distributed throughout the shop at fixed stations and usually collected data that was entered by hand because there was no good way to handle direct gage input. The good thing about these systems was that the entered data was automatically collected in a central repository so that data from the entire shop floor could be analyzed; of course, it was not a very portable solution