October 30, 2016 Sunday
Bedtime Story
The First Computer RAM was a Cathode Ray Tube!
The First Computer RAM was a Cathode Ray Tube!
It came quite a shock to me to know that the first electronic memory devise was a cathode ray tube or the CRT.
A CRT is essentially a vacuum tube (on which I have dedicated few nights of bedtime stories) with an electron gun and a phosphorescent screen.
This is the same vacuum tube that were used by the legendary J.J. Thomson to identify electrons in the Univeristy of Manchester in 1897!
This same cathode ray tube was used in the early television sets to generate images.
And it is this same vacuum tube that have the capacity to act as logical gates and perform mathematical operations!
Damn!
Left to myself, I would never have thought of utilizing an empty glass tube in this manner.
Given the contributions of these vacuum tubes to us modern apes, if we were even reasonably close to being rational, we ought to be worshipping these air-deprived glass tubes rather than the bizarre array of anthropomorphic gods.
Not only were the cathode ray tubes first electronic storage devices, they were also randomly-accessible.
The word random-access implies that the time taken to retrieve or “recall” a data by a device does not depend on the physical location of data.
This is in contrast to a devise such as a magnetic tape in a cassette or a compact disc ReWritable where the data is written down in a consecutive manner and hence the time taken to retrieve the data will depend on where on the tape or disc it was stored.
The idea to use the CRT as a data storage device came from 2 men who were working on radar at the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) first at Worth Matravers in Dorset county and later at Malvern, Worcestershire in the United Kingdom.
One of them was Frederic Williams an Engineer and the other Tom Kilburn, a mathematician and a computer scientist.
William had recruited Kilburn first at the TRE in Malvern during the World War II to develop the radar.
Later, after the war from December 1946 onwards, they worked together at the Victoria University of Manchester to develop computer.
It was here that they first tackled the problem of storage for a computer.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/
Good night and my fellow cousin ape.
Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an IIT graduate and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, may I suggest this large collection of Kids Songs:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMX11Z5SJQ3kgwSsFJLRIcg
A Cathode Ray Tube
Tom Kilburn and Freddie Williams
A Cathode Ray Tube
Tom Kilburn and Freddie Williams
An Even Better Picture
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