Traditionally, CAT scanners (Computed Axial Tomography) took a long time to scan and store the data, and you still had to wait (days or hours) for computers to generate the results. While I was at Yale, a partner lab was working on creating an optical computer that could generate results on the fly. You could literally watch your heart beat in real time! However, there were only five high-speed CAT scanners in the world at the time, and Yale didn't have one, so my job was to write software to simulate the parts of their optical computer that they didn't have yet. The data I produced was fed into a black box that injected the data optically into the part of the system they were working on.

This software, like all I wrote at Yale, was in Pascal on a VAX Microstation running VMS. I was also the administrator for that system.