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From: christy@glacier.STANFORD.EDU (Peter Christy)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: An old fashioned memory technology, CRT's, how'd they work?
Message-ID: <17131@glacier.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: Fri, 17-Jul-87 11:05:38 EDT
Article-I.D.: glacier.17131
Posted: Fri Jul 17 11:05:38 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 18-Jul-87 14:54:12 EDT
References: <602@madvax.UUCP> <3490004@wdl1.UUCP>
Reply-To: christy@glacier.UUCP (Peter Christy)
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 17

This will really date me, but... I learned to program in the summer of 1962
while attending an NSF summer math program for high school students at UCLA.
We visited the SWAC (SouthWest Automatic Computer) installation
there (one of the '50's one-up machines). It used Williams tube memory. I
was offered the chance to program it, but warned that at that time it was
so frail that if you slammed the doors on the cabinets it lost bits (really).
Instead I learned how to program the 7090 on some interesting number
theory tests.

I have quite a computer history library here, and if anyone really wants
specific references on the technology please let me know by Email and I'll
give you some book titles. Essentially Williams tubes, and the memory that
Atanasof (sp?) used in his '30's "first" digital computers we're remarkably
like today's MOS DRAMs. The nice binary cores were just a short term
abberation!

Peter Christy       christy@glacier.edu.com