[[email protected]: Re: Could a vacuum tube computer be fast?]
Kragen Javier Sitaker <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.culture.people.kragen.discuss |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
----- Forwarded message from Jamie McCarthy <[email protected]> ----- Subject: Re: Could a vacuum tube computer be fast? From: Jamie McCarthy <[email protected]> To: Kragen Javier Sitaker <[email protected]> > I'm proposing they should have built *smaller* ones in > which the tubes switched more often, and I don't know why they > didn't. Hardware flaws? It was my understanding that tube reliability was *the* major flaw in vacuum-tube computers. Hardware failures in Eniac's 17,000 tubes gave it uptimes measured in hours. Economic pressures? What were the bottlenecks of the era? Did they have many programs that were complex enough that runtime was the most important consideration? Heat dissipation problems? How did the wattage per liter, and energy efficiency, change with smaller tubes? Tubes emit most of their heat as radiation I would imagine, so the modern solution (conduct heat away and force convection) might not be an effective offset as densities increase. -- Jamie McCarthy [email protected] [email protected] 269-267-2008 ----- End forwarded message ----- -- To unsubscribe: http://lists.canonical.org/mailman/listinfo/kragen-discuss