The naked CRT in the foreground looks very much like a VCR97 to me.
That was the CRT developed for WWII airborne radar and navigation
applications and it was available at low cost in large quantities as
surplus after the war. Thousands of enthusiasts built TVs using the
VCR97 tube, often based around the Indicator No 62:
There were constructional projects published in the popular magazines
of the day - "Practical Television" being one of the biggest. They
were quite happy to watch TV in long-persistence green!
The B12D base is distinctive, as is the shape of the tube itself. It's
certainly representative of the sort of components which would have
been readily available to the constructors of the original Manchester
Baby, along with bucketloads of EF50s.
Chris
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On Wed, Jul 28, 2021 at 11:01 PM Jeff Dutky <jeff.dutky@...> wrote:
I had dismissed the notion that this was picture of a vacuum tube computer when I first saw the image, partly because of the description of the contents of the book ("How the Microchip is Changing Our World" sure doesn't seem like the place for a picture of a vacuum tube based device), and partly because I misinterpreted what I saw on the computer screens in the background. Now it seems obvious that the computers were running software to either emulate or monitor a Williams tube. In any case I must (publicly) admit to being spectacularly wrong about the picture in a private conversation: I had expected that this was an image of a radio astronomy lab, or maybe a radio or microwave transmission facility.
Also, I had assumed that the CRT we see in the foreground was for a Tek 500-series scope, but now it seems like it is probably the replacement for the Williams tube display, which makes more sense of why it would be just sitting there, naked like that.
-- Jeff Dutky
