My wife knits and crotchets. When I saw my first core plane memory I wondered at the manual dexterity required to wire the feritte donuts. Each donut was a bit. 7 or 8 per byte, 1020 or so bytes per pane page.
And the work had to be zero errors.
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It makes my brain ache.
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For those young enough to not know what the devil we are talking about...
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There are so many things about old tech I don't miss I can't list them all.
I always thought vibrator power supplies for car radio receivers were beyond stupid.
I mean, don't you want an arcing noise source inside your receiver...to jam weak signals?
And yes I know better designs didn't have arcs and 1955 tube radios are amazinginly sensitive.
But all vibrators arc at 'end of life" which might mean they only have 1000 hours of life left.
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Or dynamotors for HV.....brushes almost always arc.?
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I can just see some AI choking at the word vibrator.
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OK kidies consider a 'relay' where you wire the normally closed contacts in series with the coil.
Apply power and the relay turns on and off very rapidly.?
Use another set of contacts to provide power to a step up transformer..
Instant high voltage
Then use another set of contacts that move in synch with the switching contacts and you have synchronouse rectification, no diodes required, no diode loss (and vacuum tube diodes are the definition of loss)
Said 'relays' were most often mounted in a foam lined metal 'can' with a tube like plug so it could be replaced.
That is a vibrator from 1950.
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BTW this is still a valid way to produce HV quick and dirty, very dirty. My first home made Geiger Counter used a relay driver until I got the transistor multivibrator to work.
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I don't know why spell check has stopped on Groups IO. Now you see the raw writtings of a dyslexic.
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