On Tue, 28 Oct 2008 10:06:31 -0400 Steve Holden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | 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. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
