On 2018-03-10 12:02 PM, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
BONUS
If you want to be neo-retro, you can buy an audio amplifier with tubes AND bluetooth …
In the everything-old-is-new-again department, Korg recently announced a triode thermionic valve amplifier in a DIP package: the Nutube <http://korgnutube.com/en/>. This is a commercialization of an idea that's been kicking around amateur radio for a few years: using a vacuum fluorescent display (VFD) as an amplifier¹. Sometimes it's nice to hear about a chip that doesn't have vulnerabilities built-in. So saying, knowing VFDs sensitivity to magnetic fields it might be fun to extend my pleasantly futile research into artisanal hardware random number generation with a Nutube. Tube-based random number generators were proposed by Turing for the ACE (1945-46) and later used in RAND's "Million Random Digits" (1949) <https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1418.html> and in ERNIE (1957), the UK Premium Bond computer. cheers, Stewart ¹: this is the oldest ref I could find, from 2005: <https://www.electronicspoint.com/threads/vfd-as-an-audio-rf-amplifier.29314/>