1951 UNIVAC I - Mercury delay line Memory for computers
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I went to Control Data Institute in 1975. CDC sold the 200-UT (User Terminal), which used a Magnetostrictive Delay Line memory. That is, a wire with piezoelectric crystals at both ends. One crystal acted like a speaker, and the other like a microphone. Acoustic memory pulses would be launched down the wire and received at the other end. The transistorized circuitry would keep the keep the pulse train recirculating. The train of pulses represented the pixels on the rastered CRT screen!
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Will it blend?
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I knew a guy who went for a job with a company in 1986 at the arches under London Bridge station. They had something like this and every time a train went over they had to stop work until the mercury settled down - its one of London's busiest stations!
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But can it cook a pizza?
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@StereoMike06 Amazing stuff. Ingenious.
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That thing looks sort of like some kind of sub-atomic particle generator!
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I saw my first, and only one of these back in 1963 in Pa..In the basement of the Math Department at the University of Pa. It was being taken out..
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nice video.........................
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legal gostei muito...
Using mercury to store information as pulses... it's amazing what they came up with in the early days of computers.
dragonheadthing 3 years ago 25
Amazing, using analog technology is so much more complicated. Scientist back then really were cutting edge. There was no such thing as programmable chips everything had to have a physical mechanism to carry out a command. Very impressive.
StereoMike06 3 years ago 22