On Wed, 6 Feb 2002, Bob George wrote: > "As this book went to press, another mechanical brain, the Electronic Binary > Automatic Computer, or BINAC, was annouced [...] Binac has 512 registers of > very rapid memory in mercury tanks, and each register holds 30 binary > digits."
<SNIP> > Mercury tank storage, anyone? This was a neat bit of old technology: Code your data as a serial string of voltage pulses to a piezoelectric crystal (such as quartz) at one end of a long, skinny, tank full of mercury. This transduces the signal to sound waves, which travel down the tank to another crystal at the other end. Amplify the signal (to make up for losses), and feed it back to the first crystal. This gives you a string of bits running around in a loop. To read the data, just wait for the beginning of the string to go by. A modern equivalent would be a magnetic bubble memory. Boyd Ramsay [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
