Modern Tube computing

From: William Donzelli <aw288_at_osfn.org>
Date: Tue Jan 20 18:03:06 2004

> Have we forgotten John Zabolitzky's MUNIAC?

No, but I haven't heard anything about it since the initial flurry of
activity.

I would also like to fool around with making a tube based computer, but
frankly, I have enough projects to keep me busy. I have the tubes -
probably about 2000 computer rated dual triodes of various flavors, but I
am holding them until someone rolls a tubeless 709 up my driveway.

One thing I would find very interesting is making a tube computer (or
rather just the building blocks) using technology from 1930. No modern
stuff. Vintage tubes (24s, 27s, and the like), vintage sockets, vintage
caps and resistors, and so forth. It might be fun to see if even basic
logic functions could be made reasonably. Of course, a full computer
(imagine racks and racks of black wrinkle chassis with glowing tubes
behind) is silly for many reasons - size (even a serial machine would have
a big footprint), and parts availability (the tubes are not so bad, it is
everthing else, like *good* *reliable* vintage caps, as well as the iron).
And the radio people would probably hang you for buying up all these
parts.

William Donzelli
aw288_at_osfn.org
Received on Tue Jan 20 2004 - 18:03:06 GMT