Okay, I'm confused. I wrote (of vacuum tube computers being, in
principle, faster than transistor)
>> How so? Are flight times between cathode and anode shorter than
>> transit times between emitter and collector? Or is there some other
>> effect going on that I've missed?
Then William Donzelli <aw288_at_osfn.org> replied
> That is basically it - flying electrons don't have other junk to bump
> into, like they do in solid state.
This (and the original note) implies that tubes are inherently faster
in this way. But then...
> This transit time problem pretty much killed standard tubes in the
> microwave region - to get the things to work properly, the
> cathode-grid-plate spacing had to be extremely small.
...this sounds as though it's the converse; this sounds as though tube
transit times are inconveniently _high_.
So I don't get it.
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Received on Tue Jan 20 2004 - 23:37:47 GMT