2 Aug
2004
2 Aug
'04
7:21 a.m.
And just why would that be a bad idea? Remember
this was back some
years - your glib "these days" doesn't apply to 'them days'... in
the
60's and 70's it was not trivial to develop 'real' random numbers, so
various means were used to sample a physical source or 'randomness'. I
have an audio whit noise generator (Grayson Stadler) that uses a 6CB4 tube
with a small bar magnet in proximity to the envelope - this exacerbates
the transit noise of the tube and produses a very nice 5 Htz to about 50
kHtz stream of chaos.
This is pretty standard stuff in the military ECM world (I think the
O-202/ALA-7 pulse generator works the same way, early B-52 era stuff). In
fact, some relatively normal tubes were made for this trick.
I found my box of phototube noise generators, pulled out of WW2
jammers. Cheap. Email if interested.
William Donzelli
aw288(a)osfn.org