20 Jun
2004
20 Jun
'04
9:45 p.m.
On Sun, 20 Jun 2004, David V. Corbin wrote:
Are we really "doomed" to re-invent the vacuum tube? ;)
You might joke, but a few years ago (and I don't mean 50 years ago :-)),
I was reading about a new device that was consisted essentially of
field-emitting (rather than thermionic emitting) valves etched into a
silicon chip. The principles, other than the cathode, of course, were
identical to those of the valve. The advantage of such devices is that
they were much more radiation-hard than conventional transsitor-based chips.
A few years before that I read about a new sort of memory, based on
quantized magnetic flux through a superconduction loop. The principle of
reading and writing were identical to core memory. I remember laughing as
they descrived provlems and possible solutions that were totally obvious
to anyone who'd ever worked on said ferrite core memory....
-tony
Does it
matter that some knowledge is lost as generations go on?
I think it does matter. Thinking "Those who forget the past are doomed to
repeat it".