[Info-vax] OT: book from George Dyson.

[brendan welch]

On 4/6/2012 11:16 AM, Rich Jordan wrote:
> On Apr 6, 6:40 am, Neil Rieck<n.ri... at sympatico.ca>  wrote:
>> Attention Computer Technologists. George Dyson (son of Freeman Dyson)
>> just published a book titled "Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the
>> Digital Universe" which appears to be a must-own gem.
>>
>> book:http://www.amazon.com/Turings-Cathedral-Origins-Digital-Universe/dp/0...
>>
>> video:http://ww3.tvo.org/video/173792/george-dyson-origins-digital-universe
>>
>> I've been working in the computer industry since 1976 and had not
>> heard the story about Williams Tube memory (1024 lighted areas of war-
>> surplus oscilloscope cathode ray tubes). You connect 40 of these
>> together to make 5 KB of memory. As the bits (screen phosphors) begin
>> to fade they need to be refreshed. This is not much different than
>> what goes on in modern DRAM where charges leak away from internal
>> capacitors.
>>
>> Neil Rieck
>> Kitchener / Waterloo / Cambridge,
>> Ontario, Canada.http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/
>
> One of the engineering grad students at my college did "101 things you
> can do with a dead sillyscope" as a senior project.  I wonder if I
> still have the handout from that (I was a freshman at the
> presentation).  I don't recall one of the 'things' being use as memory
> though.
>
> Sounds like a neat book, thanks Neil.

It is not exactly the same thing, but I used the screen of an early 6 
Mhz IBM PC, as the memory to generate a pretty large list of prime 
numbers.  For programming convenience, I just let it run overnight, 
using some easy-to-learn DOS-type instructions.

http://www.setileague.org/articles/primes/index.html  if you are 
masochistic.