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

[Rich Jordan]

On Apr 10, 12:10 pm, brendan welch <w1... at uml.edu> wrote:
> On 4/6/2012 11:16 AM, Rich Jordan wrote:
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> > 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.
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> >> book:http://www.amazon.com/Turings-Cathedral-Origins-Digital-Universe/dp/0...
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> >> video:http://ww3.tvo.org/video/173792/george-dyson-origins-digital-universe
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> >> 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.
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> >> Neil Rieck
> >> Kitchener / Waterloo / Cambridge,
> >> Ontario, Canada.http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/
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> > 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.
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> > Sounds like a neat book, thanks Neil.
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> 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.
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> http://www.setileague.org/articles/primes/index.html if you are
> masochistic.

Good thing you had the turbocharged 6MHz model, not the base original
4.77 MHz or it would have taken weeks...