Erik is not the only one. Check out Tatiana van Vark. Here's a picture of what is in her DINING ROOM, the complete electronics suite from a Vulcan bomber! <http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_-l2C8nYmCV0/SIZAyMatFFI/AAAAAAAAB24/0w-Lvf_4BtM/s400/vulc071s.jpg> There's also a video of her picking up a Litton inertial measuring unit and moving it around, there's 3 racks of gear to support it. Jon

You can find more here: http://www.tatjavanvark.nl/projects.html and here: http://www.craftsmanshipmuseum.com/vanvark.htm paul

I like http://www.tatjavanvark.nl/tvvd/viewer223.html . I have that tube and bits of a radio (original) that uses it. That tube is interesting: it's the world's first integrated circuit. Yes, a hollow state integrated circuit. I describe it that way because it is a complete subsystem (in this case, a complete 3 stage audio amplifier) rather than just something like a dual-triode tube where the connecting components are still external. paul

The artist who built that radio is Dutch; the tube is German (Loewe). I know of two of these IC tubes: 2HF and 3NF, which stands for "2 stage high frequency amplifier" (i.e., RF amplifier) and "3 stage low frequency amplifier" (i.e., audio amplifier). In each case, these are full circuits, including all the bias resistors and coupling elements, all enclosed within the vacuum envelope. You can see them in good pictures: the passive elements are long skinny tubes, enclosed in glass to protect the vacuum. Yes, the reasoning supposedly was taxation. http://www.electricstuff.co.uk/loewe.html has some more detail, including about some other designs along these lines: a Loewe dual pentode plus triode, and a GEC photocell plus amplifier. This sort of stuff doesn't seem to be all that common; I haven't seen it elsewhere. Multiple tubes, like dual triodes or triode/heptodes are pretty common, but those are just the active part. paul

Perhaps Selectrons. -- Will

On 04/26/2016 09:47 PM, William Donzelli wrote: There were also "Compactrons", 12-pin tubes kind of extending the 7- and 9-pin submini tubes. Some of them had at least 3 elements in one envelope. Jon

European tubes are easy to evaluate in that respect because the letter codes designate what's inside. I remember the EABC80 (not sure that's the correct number), which is a diode plus double-diode plus triode. Intended application, if I remember right, was FM detector (discriminator, double diode), AGC detector (single diode) and audio preamp (triode). paul

And I'd be interested in whether she had some help in maintaining all this outstanding equipment ;-) For one perrson alone this is really incredible!

Yes, Tatiana is the queen of collecting this kind of stuff and she has an excellent page! Well, I have a similar video of my "baby" which is somewhat newer - look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EQqfxiGgd8 beginning minute 5:00. The LN-3 you can see in Tatiana's video is from the 1960ties (F4, F104 and many others) and all computation is done mechanically using gears and ball resolvers for Sinus/Cosinus. In the FIN-1010 shown in my video being from the 1970ties, some calculation (e.g. integration of rate to orientation) is still done mechanically within the gyroscopes, platform alignment and maintaining the position of the platform as well as flipping the gimbals is accomplished by an analog computer (OpAmps and so on). Last but not least a bitserial digital computer is supervising the analog computer and changing its "program flow". Additionally the digital machine contains routines for calibration of gyro drift etc. The digital computer also solves the navigation equations of direction and distance to goal. So the fascinating thing is the combination of different technologies and the outstanding precision needed and achieved by the mechanical instruments. Altough the digital machine consists of only ~200 TTL chips, it is a 32 bit machine and delivers 33 navigation oututs per second. BTW: This enabled the Tornado aircraft to fly autonomously 200 ft above ground at supersonic speeds passing certain preprogrammed waypoints... Erik.

On Tue, 26 Apr 2016, Swift Griggs wrote: Hi Swift, I got into this hobby via the computer side - everything started as I wanted to have a computer using core memory and so I bought a black box from the Tornado aircraft which contained core. This started a 10 year yourney of analyzing it, decyphering the command set and building tools to program it. Only years later I got the information, that the box is a 12 bit version of the famous Elliott 900 family which was "popular" in the UK in the 1960ties. I have a project page on this: http://www.baigar.de/TornadoComputerUnit/index.html No, I am just keeping this stuff with two goals: (1) Keeping it in working order to preserve some strange unknown technology and (2) learn how the guys of the 1970tis squeezed out amazing things of this technology. Well in my opinion the inertial navigation systems are the most complex and advanced pieces of equipment available: They combine outstanding mechanics and mechanical, analog-electronic and digital computing... Apart from this I am fascinated from graphics generators which (e.g. for the head up displays of the 1970ties) achieved vector graphics update rates of 50Hz an more (circles and lines) in 512x512 pixel resolution without having memory to store a single frame. I have a logbook on my activities, but of course I should do more for "marketing" all this stuff... http://www.baigar.de/TornadoComputerUnit/TimeLine.html#HDDsim Erik.