4 Apr
2024
4 Apr
'24
1:12 p.m.
On Apr 3, 2024, at 6:32 PM, Rick Bensene
<rickb(a)bensene.com> wrote:
I wrote:
I didn't see any either, and the patent examiners didn't cite any. Then again,
it's amazing how often patent examiners miss relevant prior art. One example I like
to mention is Edwin Armstrong's patent for FM radio, which doesn't cite an actual
earlier US patent, 1,648,402 from 1927, actually filed 12 years before Armstrong's.
Or the prior art centuries preceding US 6469...
On the other hand, while the concept is similar the details are rather different, and the
Wyle design is clearly a whole lot simpler.
> The digits are among the nicest looking
digits that I've ever seen
> on a CRT display, including those on the CDC scopes as well as IBM >> console
displays.
To which Paul responded:
I have, somewhere, a copy of a paper that
describes analog circuits > for generating waveforms for digits along the lines you
describe.
Might have been from MIT, in the 1950s, but right now I can't find > it.
Found it (on paper): "Generating
characters" by Kenneth Perry and
Everett Aho, > Electronics, Jan 3, 1958, pp. 72-75.
Bitsavers has it in the MIT/LincolnLaboratory
section:
https://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/lincolnLaboratory/Perry_and_Aho__Generating_C…
Very interesting. Here's a link to the patent for the display system on the Wyle
Labs calculator:
https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/17/51/58/89c19cee6c60e2/US33058…
The concepts are very similar to the paper written up in ELECTRONICS magazine in early
1958 that you found. Your memory is incredible to have been able to have this pop into
your mind when you read my description of the way the calculator generates its display.
Thank you for looking up this article! It'll provide some nice background for the
concepts of generating characters this way when I finally get to documenting the Wyle
WS-01/WS-02 calculators in an Old Calculator Museum exhibit.
I wonder if the inventor of the display system for the calculator (in fact, the inventor
of the entire Wyle Labs calculator architecture) had read this article at some point
prior?
I scanned through the patent for the calculator display system looking for any reference
to the article or any document from MIT relating, and I couldn't find anything.
The inventor is still alive, and I have talked to him
on the telephone a couple of times. For his advanced age, he is still quite sharp, and
remembers a lot of the challenges involved with trying to make a solid-state electronic
calculator that would fit on a (large) desktop using early 1960's technology.
It would be neat to ask him about that MIT article.
paul