"Doug Dotson" dougdotson@NOSPAMcablespeedNOSPAMcom wrote in message
...

"Glenn Ashmore" wrote in message
news:QnpXd.56586$SF.18771@lakeread08...



"John Proctor" wrote in message
news:2005030907232116807%lost@nowhereorg...
Here is a scarry thought.

My wife went in for LASIK surgery to her eyes. Basically it a laser
procedure where they correct your eyes for astigmatism. They use a
laser interferometer to map the surface of your eyball and them use
mathematics to work out the sequence of laser blasts to ablate the
eyball surface to generate good vision. The gave her a DVD of the
process they did on her eyes and guess what? The whole thing is
controlled by a Windoze PC. I wonder what would happen if the blue
screen of death came up in the middle of a procedure;-)

I noticed to that when I got my eyeballs spot welded. But I had a
couple
of
Valums working so just bowed towards Redmond, WA and crossed my fingers.
:-)

I've been running my laptop almost 24/7 for about a year and a half and it
has
yet to crash. I hope the eye doctor was running XP.

Doug

--
Glenn Ashmore

I worked for about a year (4 years ago) as a test technician at an OEM
company that made embedded microprocessor products for several medical
electronics firms for eye surgery. Quite often the boards we tested were
small quantities and we usually had no clue what some of the connectors
interfaced with once we sent them to our customer. However, silk screen
labels such as foot pedal left, right, forward, back, up, down, etc raised
my curiosity. It seems the eye surgeons use a foot pedal control similar to
the clamp on skates we played with as children. Yes, the processors and
firmware used Intel products, so I am not surprised there is a Windows XXX
interface, but I doubt if Windows was directly controlling the surgery. I
suspect it was used for logging and visual magnification, etc. The OEM
boards appeared to be the surgeon interface to the laser and fluid washers,
etc.

73 Doug K7ABX