Sounds like a dedicated pulse-height analyzer. DEC sold a lot of machines used for this purpose, but there were dedicated units that had no CPU, but had memory, often core.
>From Wikipedia: "A Pulse Height Analyzer (PHA) is an instrument used in >nuclear and elementary particle physics research which accepts electronic >pulses of varying heights from particle and event detectors, digitizes the >pulse heights, and saves the number of pulses of each height in registers or >channels for later spectral analysis." --Bill
