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Since 1989: what a mining LIMS looked like before the web

Online LIMS Canada Ltd. was incorporated in Ontario in 2001. The software is older than the company. These photographs, taken in a Chilean laboratory in 1993 and 1994, are the oldest record we have of OnLIMS running in production.

Why these are photographs and not screenshots

There were no screenshots. If you wanted to show your software at a conference, you pointed a camera at the monitor, finished the roll, sent it to be developed — Kodak, usually — and waited. Only when the prints came back could you paste them onto a board or a slide.

That is why the frames are slightly out of square, why the phosphor bleeds at the edges and why the colours are not quite what the screen showed. Anyone who ran a laboratory in those years will recognise the routine immediately. Everyone else has probably never held a roll of film.

These prints were later scanned. They are the only visual record that survives, and we would rather publish them as they are than not publish them at all.

Two 5.25-inch Maxell floppy disks, one in its paper sleeve with a handwritten label reading M&P 2.0 and Online Systems Ltda., resting on a blue folder printed with the current OnLIMS logo.
The distribution medium and the brand, thirty years apart. The handwritten label reads M&P 2.0 — Online Systems Ltda. with a Santiago fax number; underneath is a folder we print today. Both disks are 5¼-inch — the wide, genuinely flexible kind, not the rigid 3½-inch cartridge that most people picture when they hear “floppy”.

1989 — OnLine Systems, Reñaca, Chile

The company that wrote OnLIMS was called OnLine Systems and it operated from Reñaca, on the Chilean coast. The evidence is on screen: the driver that talks to a Varian atomic absorption spectrometer carries its own copyright line.

DOS screen of the OnLine Varian AA instrument driver, showing element and unit fields, detection limits, and a centred notice reading Varian AA connection to OnLine LIMS 3.3, copyright 1989 to 1993 by OnLine Systems, P.O. Box 5042, Renaca, Chile.
© '89 – '93 by OnLine Systems — P.O.Box 5042, Reñaca CHILE. The panel on the left holds the element (As by atomic absorption), the unit in mg/l, the dilution factor and the lower and upper detection limits — 5 and 1000. The columns across the top are sample, dilution, four readings, average, status and result. At the bottom of the screen, the raw bytes arriving from the serial port.

1993–1994 — version 3.x in production

By then the system was running in real laboratories, split by discipline, and it already did most of what a LIMS is bought for today.

Text-mode LIMS screen headed LIMS Utilities, ONLINE Lims 3.2, showing a job for a client named Minera Encontrada Por Fin Ltda., with fields for reference, sample type, preparation, storage location and rejects, over a grid of 140 sample numbers in different colours.
A job in the Metallurgy module: work order, sample type, preparation route, storage location B-1141, rejects, and the elements requested. Below, one hundred and forty samples colour-coded by state — the red ones are the ones that needed attention. The client name, Minera Encontrada Por Fin Ltda., is a joke someone typed in and never removed.
Similar text-mode LIMS screen headed ELAB, OnLine LIMS 3.3, for a client named DGF Labor GmbH, showing a job reference to a fax, project name, chemist, sample and duplicate counts, over the same colour-coded grid of sample numbers.
The same board in the Geology module, for a German laboratory. The job reference is FAX 1321: work arrived by fax and the fax number became the traceable reference. Note the fields for project, responsible chemist, number of duplicates and number of tests — QA/QC was in the job header from the start.
Text-mode print preview screen headed Print View, OnLine LIMS 3.3, showing three pages of continuous fanfold paper complete with tractor-feed sprocket holes drawn on screen, above a control panel with line displacement values and page count.
Print preview, in text mode, drawing the sprocket holes of continuous fanfold paper so the chemist could see where each line would land before committing a box of paper to a dot-matrix printer. Seventy-one samples, thirteen elements, four pages.
Bar chart on a blue background titled Report Status, with one bar per day from 1 to 31 January, each split between a green segment labelled Closed and an orange segment labelled Pending.
Daily throughput for the month: reports closed against reports still pending. The same question a laboratory manager asks a dashboard today, answered in 1994 with sixteen colours.
Green-on-black text report titled Statistic by Project for the month of January 1994, listing projects with columns for samples, controls, analyses, pending, low RD and total dollars, ending in a total row.
January 1994: 4,234 samples, 15,549 analyses and USD 216,443.34, broken down by project with control samples and pending work counted separately. Work units converted to money — the same calculation OnLAB performs today.
A 5.25-inch Maxell floppy disk beside its paper sleeve, with a handwritten label reading LIMS 3.0 Demo Version in English, Online Systems Ltda., a fax number and Santiago, Chile.
The demo. LIMS 3.0 — Demo Version (Eng), on 1.2 MB, posted to whoever asked for it. There was already an English edition, and the only way to reach the company was a fax number. Note that this is not the diskette most people remember: the sleeve calls it a mini-floppy, and at 5¼ inches it is genuinely floppy — it bends, which is where the name comes from. It sits between the 8-inch disk that came before it and the 3½-inch cartridge that came after, the rigid one in the hard plastic shell that ended up as the save icon your software still uses today.

2001 — Online LIMS Canada Ltd.

The Canadian company was incorporated in Ontario in 2001 and is the entity behind OnLIMS today, with support out of Ontario and Santiago. The founding date on our documents refers to the company; the software it sells had been in laboratories for twelve years by then.

What did not change

Look again at what those screens do. A board of samples colour-coded by state. A job header carrying the client, the preparation route, the storage location, the responsible chemist and the number of duplicates. Readings pulled straight off the instrument with detection limits and a dilution factor applied. Production and money counted per project. Pending work made visible.

That is the same list you will find in the technical specification sheet we publish today. The database changed, the language changed, the screen changed. The problems a production laboratory has did not.