dictionary

[D'Arcy J.M. Cain]

On Tue, 28 Oct 2008 10:06:31 -0400
Steve Holden <steve at holdenweb.com> wrote:
> 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

A kilobit?  One tube would carry one bit.  Imagine the size of today's
computers if we were still using them.  In those days you were lucky to
get 4 Kbytes of core memory.

In those days they would have techs walking back and forth along
pathways inside the memory banks with shopping carts full of tubes
replacing them as they burned out.  Programs had to be prepared to deal
with the fact that bits could go dead at any time and functions would
run multiple times and hold an election to determine the correct answer.

-- 
D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy at druid.net>         |  Democracy is three wolves
http://www.druid.net/darcy/                |  and a sheep voting on
+1 416 425 1212     (DoD#0082)    (eNTP)   |  what's for dinner.