dictionary

[Steve Holden]

Scott David Daniels wrote:
> Hendrik van Rooyen wrote:
>> ...
>>
>> You had Compilers!
>> You had Compiler Vendors!
>>
>> When I was lad, we had nowt but raw hardware.
>> We had to sit in cold room, ears deafened by
>> whine of fan, clicking switches to load our
>> octal in computer. We just had error light...
> 
> You had octal!  We just had oscilloscope traces shifting up and down.
> If there wasn't a metal mask over the oscilloscope with marks where
> the bits were, we'd have been in a world of hurt.
> 
You were lucky! We had to imagine where the bits would have been if we'd
had them. We only use to see real bits on Easter Sundays, if we'd been
good all year. T'rest o' t'time we 'ad ter make do wi' pieces of stone.

Bizarre though it may sound in this age of integrated circuits there
really was a storage device that used a cathode ray tube to store (IIRC)
a kilobit of information. It detected, by the use of a capacitance plate
on the front of the tube, whether the bits in each position were 1 or 0
by determining whether the beam was focused or defocused, since each had
a different effect on the charge of the plate. It was a dynamic device,
and only retained the information by writing back what was read
continuously, just like any other dynamic memory.

yorkshireman-ly y'rs  - steve
-- 
Steve Holden        +1 571 484 6266   +1 800 494 3119
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