On Jan 29, 9:57 am, dr pepper <[email protected]> wrote: > Fascinating. > > Reminded me of colosus, maybe thats where some of the ideas are from, > must cost a mint to make one of those, interesting looking at the vid > that the time counters at the bottom of the machine are counting in > binary, maybe bcd, the tubes higher up must be bcd to decimal > translater matrixes. > > I really like the planar dekatron, if someone finds a load of those > stockpiled it'll make a few quid, but thats not gonna happen. >
Believe it or not, digital logic predates ICs. The British Colosus to ENIAC, UNIVAC, and all the computers built to the late 50s used vacuum tubes. To bad there's no technical documents on Colosus. They probably built more than one, but it was a very classified project, and they destroyed all documentation on it. The British have recently resurrected the Harwell WITCH dekatron computer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harwell_computer Computer manufacturers were early adopters of transistors, so by about 1958, a tube computer was considered an old design. Of course, at that time there were less than 100 computers in the world (?). But with discrete components, you have a lot of options for your logic. Yes, you can build binary counters, and decode the binary or BCD results, or you can use ring counters which needs no further decoding. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/neonixie-l?hl=en-GB.
