But even so it worked, if only for a short amount of time. To be clear, we’re not talking about a ton of data-at the high end, a single tube could hold 2,048 bits, or 256 bytes of data. Essentially, it leverages the fact that electrons will stick to the phosphor of the screen for a short amount of time, allowing data to be stored for a brief period of time as long as the electrons are occasionally refreshed to store the information. Notably, the way that these tubes worked to store information leveraged features of CRTs that would have been undesirable if you were a television viewer. This tube ended up being used by a number of important early computers, most notably the UNIVAC, as a way to store information. Williams and Tom Kilburn, researchers at the British Telecommunications Research Establishment who used the properties of the CRT to store random-access data on a CRT-based monitor, a solution called the Williams-Kilburn Tube. Perhaps the most notable example of this was developed by Fredrick C.
The CRT had a similar arc of having value in a lot of areas, including in the management and storage of memory. CRT as RAM: How early optical cathode ray tubes found use as primitive forms of computer memoryĪs we’ve written in the past, vacuum tubes had an important role in the history of computing, even if that role has evolved somewhat in the modern day.
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