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Re:Glowing mercury thyratrons: inside a 1940s Teletype switc... by Animats on Monday September 10, 2018 @10:02PM (#17956672)
Oh, did you get the ones Steve Garrison makes up? That's my design. Or did someone else get the files off Github and make some?

A switching power supply has actual power conversion driven by the switching. See The Art of Electronics, by Horowitz and Hill, 3rd ed., section 9.6.

That thyratron circuit is a lamp dimmer circuit repurposed as a voltage regulator. Like SCRs and triacs, a thyratron is a switch you can't turn off. You have to wait for the input power to turn off. Usually that's the next cycle of AC. Because you can't turn off the power, you can't generate inductive spikes, so you can't pull the basic trick that make a switching power supply go.

There were some real switchers in the tube era. The most common one was used to generate the high voltage (10KV-20KV) for CRTs. Those used the horizontal oscillator, running at 15KHz and yanking the beam back at the end of each scan line, as a spike generator. That approach used a real vacuum tube, not a cold-cathode gas filled tube like a thyratron. So those were high voltage but low current devices.

Switching power supplies with serious current output had to wait for a component that could turn off fast under load. Power MOSFETS, etc. If you could do that with a thyratron, we would have had switching power supplies by 1950.

Re:Glowing mercury thyratrons: inside a 1940s Teletype switc... by CamperBob2 on Tuesday September 11, 2018 @03:19AM (#17957758)
Because you can't turn off the power, you can't generate inductive spikes, so you can't pull the basic trick that make a switching power supply go

So what's a charge pump? Chopped liver?