14 Feb
2008
14 Feb
'08
2:12 p.m.
In article <e1d20d630802141250o7d45a1e9o93b016a2b2345445 at mail.gmail.com>,
"William Donzelli" <wdonzelli at gmail.com> writes:
Its not to say that *no* electronic components of any variety were
being produced with specific quality and reliability standards, its the
components that were being used to fabricate Whirlwind. In
particular, things like core memory were invented for Whirlwind, so
there was no established quality/reliability metric.
I can dig out the portion of the book and cite specifics if its really
a huge point of contention.
MIT/Whirlwind/SAGE didn't do this for things like wires, resistors,
inductors, etc., but for the more advanced components that were newly
invented. I know they did it for core memory, and I believe there
were also some tubes mentioned.
--
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As a user of
the devices, the MIT
team developed methods for testing and characterizing components and
rejecting the components most likely to fail early. This knowledge
fed back to the manufacturers to the point where the manufacturers
started doing their own testing and QA of their components. According
to the book, this was the first systematic attempt at characterizing
these sorts of components (tubes) in any meaningful way.
I hope no oldtimers from Western Electric read this book. Or the
military. Or RCA. Or Sylvania.