20 Jan
2004
20 Jan
'04
11:37 p.m.
Okay, I'm confused. I wrote (of vacuum tube computers being, in
principle, faster than transistor)
> How so? Are flight times between cathode and
anode shorter than
> transit times between emitter and collector? Or is there some other
> effect going on that I've missed?
Then William Donzelli <aw288(a)osfn.org> replied
That is basically it - flying electrons don't have
other junk to bump
into, like they do in solid state.
This (and the original note) implies that tubes are inherently faster
in this way. But then...
This transit time problem pretty much killed standard
tubes in the
microwave region - to get the things to work properly, the
cathode-grid-plate spacing had to be extremely small.
...this sounds as though it's the converse; this sounds as though tube
transit times are inconveniently _high_.
So I don't get it.
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