

In the early years of the digital capture of spectral data the main limitation was storage capacity. As computer control of instrumentation became more prevalent, there was a need to also interface the detectors of instruments to the computer so that data (analog or digital) could be captured as it was generated, rather than output it on oscilloscope screens or chart recorders (see ).

Since the early 1970’s microcomputers (as they were called at the time) have been a huge part of the development of scientific instrumentation. AIST Spectral Database for Organic Compounds (SDBS).Where to obtain reliable spectral information.JCAMP-DX, AnIML, ANDI, NetCDF, CSV, Tab delimited (XY format).Understand the formats for representing spectral data.
