Passage: Data loggers are implicitly stand-alone devices, while typical data acquisition system must remain tethered to a computer to acquire data. This stand-alone aspect of data loggers implies on-board memory that is used to store acquired data. Sometimes this memory is very large to accommodate many days, or even months, of unattended recording.  This memory may be battery-backed static random access memory, flash memory or EEPROM.  Earlier data loggers used magnetic tape, punched paper tape, or directly viewable records such as "strip chart recorders".

Question: what must data acquisition systems stay connected to?
a computer