15 Feb
2008
15 Feb
'08
3:03 p.m.
Brent Hilpert wrote:
To be realisitic about what might have been
accomplished in 1900 the whole
issue of building a large system of hundreds/thousands of components needs to
be looked at more seriously. Will raised the issue for tubes, but it applies to
all the other components as well, regarding reliability, uniformity and
stability of characteristics.
I expect that isolated testing / fine-tuning before feeding the components
into the production area would help a lot, though. Screen out the faulty /
really bad stuff, and tweak the marginal bits to produce components that are a
bit more uniform in performance.
There's still the issues of attaining enough supply that Will mentioned, and
of course factors during operation play a part (longevity, issues of heat /
vibration etc.), but I expect it could be done.
The idea of building such large systems was
considered daunting or simply implausible even in the 1940's
I think the issues there revolved largely around a belief that the end result
simply wouldn't work to the required spec, rather than it not being possible
to do at all.
I think something electric is achievable, but I still think that something
which was largely mechanical in nature (at least for the logic) would have
been a better bet.
cheers
Jules