On 04/19/2015 04:27 PM, phiscock@ee.ryerson.ca wrote:
Fascinating stuff. Thanks for the pointer.
One of the things mentioned, but not described was the "Williams tube", which was a type of memory based on a CRT, with the phosphor decay time being used for storage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_tube They also mentioned delay lines. I used to work on some video terminals that used a delay line, though a coil of wire was used instead of mercury. Incidentally, I aslo used to work on an ancient "Teleregister" computer, located in the basement of the old stock exchange building at 234 Bay St. It was a single purpose computer, as was common back then, which was used to transmit stock prices to brokers offices. It was built with vacuum tubes & relays and had a memory drum. I recall gapping the heads, with a piece of bond paper, between the head and drum. That system was older than I was.