When I was in the USN quite a few years ago I got to see, the Univac "all vacuum tube" computer still in operation, processing payroll, at the Mare Island Naval shipyard, at Vallejo Ca. I'll NEVER forget it. They had to have something in the vicinity of 25 tons of A/C on the roof for proper cooling. Wish I had a video camera back then!!! Ira.

On 1/29/2012 12:50 PM, threeneurons wrote:

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.


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