asciilifeform: jurov: if going to tubes, one ought to stop thinking in terms of gates and start considering how much computation can be carried out by one flying electron...☟︎
asciilifeform: ogy had not advanced as quickly as it did in the first half of the 1960s, the Compactron idea might have been developed further, with even more tubes in a single envelope...'
asciilifeform: 'What GE did was combine multiple common tube types into "fat" tubes—as many as four in a single glass envelope, all heated from the same filament. The idea was to reduce the amount of power required to heat the tubes and the space they required on the circuit board, as well as the associated costs of multiple sockets. In a very crude way, GE was applying the concept of integrated circuits to tubes, and if solid-state technl
asciilifeform: keeping the number of parts at a minimum.
asciilifeform: and when using exotic/handmade logic, you will probably take the opposite approach from a si designer - maximally 'un-unroll' the loops.
asciilifeform: on traditional principles of valve logic.
asciilifeform: potentially, one could create a sequential circuit of arbitrary complexity using laser-cut metallic baffles in a long glass vacuum flask.
asciilifeform: the whole point, here, is to avoid the statal spittoon dragged in by the use of si microfabrication.
asciilifeform: ecl miners probably live on the same planet as gallium arsenide, etc. miners.
asciilifeform: (assembling these into a circuit with 'weakest link' still permitting these speeds, is 'an exercise for the alert reader')☟︎
asciilifeform: jurov: check out a modern catalogue (e.g., 'digikey') - you can get ecl parts going into double-digit GHz
asciilifeform: my symbolics lisp mach., interestingly, has a board with a good number of ecl discretes. turned out, this was the framebuffer. it was the only way to crunch ~200MHz at the time
asciilifeform: it was used in certain '80s supercomputers.
asciilifeform: jurov: ecl (emitter-coupled logic) is a supposedly-obsolete way to build logical circuits (on any particular semiconductor chemistry) where a transistor is kept near switching point at all times, gaining speed at the expense of economy
asciilifeform: (almost certainly not, i might add, per watt. plant it somewhere mains power is 'phree')☟︎
asciilifeform: http://ummr.altervista.org/scansTEKECL.jpg << these (or, more realistically, modern) ECL discretes would probably outperform a modern integrated miner, were they to be built into a (washing-machine-sized) one...
asciilifeform: ^ should occupy any aficionado for most of an evening
asciilifeform: davout: (not hard, because 1st ed. is virtually impossible to find. i actually preferred it, though, had better paper. and the differences are negligible)
asciilifeform: everything else, esp. the backbreakers with enormous print and oceans of whitespace that you will encounter at your local bookstore, is garbage
asciilifeform: it was a procedure for folks who refused to plead (submit to the jurisdiction of the court. formerly, english courts could only try folks who 'agreed' to be tried)
asciilifeform: peine forte et dure - was not an execution, as such
