Them new fangled transistor compters

[zeitghost]

Electronic Computer Exhibition

Stone me, OC44 and OC45 transistors in a computer.

I built an audio amp with OC23 transistors.

It sounded quite good.

Just noticed that there's mention of a vey early "Xeronic" printer.

The predecessor of the laser printer.

The result of co-operation between Rank & Xerox.

[SupremeSpod]

George3 running on Raspberry Pi

[Gibbon]

Ahhhh, Eliot processors, brings back some memories. Worked on the 920C with a half ferrite core and half EEPROMS. 14 octal machine instructions and that was your lot, searching link maps for spare bits of memory and having to do stepping stone jumps to get to a big enough piece of contiguous space.

[xoggoth]

Eliot processors? You must be a lot older than you look!! Think the Elliot 405 was the first I ever worked on.

[mudskipper]

George3 running on Raspberry Pi

George 3

That's where I started my life in IT.

[Gibbon]

Eliot processors? You must be a lot older than you look!! Think the Elliot 405 was the first I ever worked on.

It was some old military kit, designed in the 70s and still in use in the nineties.

[zeitghost]

It was some old military kit, designed in the 70s and still in use in the nineties.

Funny how that old core store is rad hard & comes back to life after you cycle the power.

Unlike dynamic ram.



And speaking of which:

Glenn's Computer Museum

Plated wire memory.

I'd forgotten about that one.

And here's one they've just repaired:

BBC News - Two-tonne Witch computer gets a reboot

Described in today's Metro (that journal of record) as

This ramshackle collection of valves, buttons and wires

It doesn't look particularly ramshackle to me.

The machine first ran in 1951 and was known as the Harwell Dekatron - so named for the valves it used as a memory store.

Although slow - the machine took up to 10 seconds to multiply two numbers - it proved very reliable and often cranked up 80 hours of running time in a week.

Ah, blinken lights - Dekatrons are neon filled counter valves.

10 seconds per multiply.

Quicker than someone using a mechanical adding machine, I suppose.