15 Feb
2008
15 Feb
'08
6:54 a.m.
Gavin Melville wrote:
Fluidics/pneumatics: possible, but way less fun, and
we suspect
manufacturing tolerances of the time would have made this really hard.
Not sure about way less fun :-) I suspect it could be done; valves of the time
would be quite leaky, but providing the design is such that errors aren't
allowed to accumulate I expect it'd be possible.
Relays: Possible, but even in 1945 was very hard.
Available by 1901 at
the latest.
Why do you say 'very hard'? I'm not sure when the relay was invented, but I
suspect it was way before 1901, given that the concept of an electromagnet was
so much earlier. The concepts I thought were well understood, at least within
the realms of telephony, by the 1940s.
Optical: Photo electric "cells" (not
intentional) using selenium were
around in 1873.
I seem to recall that this was about the biggest problem in getting Colossus
to work in the 1940s; the technology for doing the optical detection of the
tape data just wasn't really 'there' yet, not at any speed. I think the
maximum they managed to get was around 8KHz, but it wasn't particularly
reliable (I think 5KHz was the norm, and it took an awful lot of initial
effort to get that working properly).
I will say some of the replies on this group are
realistic -- when I
mentioned this at work one colleague (Windows Programmer) asked if it
would run a web server. Sigh.
Heh - Ethernet interface and TCP/IP stack using 1900-era tech, anyone? :-)
cheers
Jules