Re:A 1958 UNIVAC airline reservation system
by EvanAnderson on Sunday November 07, 2021 @07:32PM
(#29145004)
This is too cool. Thank you so much for that rabbit hole! I had no idea there was ever such a development program. Some simple searches on "cryotron computing" are returning some really promising-looking articles.
Re:A 1958 UNIVAC airline reservation system
by EvanAnderson on Monday November 08, 2021 @05:47PM
(#29155302)
The rabbit hole is deeper. That's a really compelling-lookin book. I'm going to get my hands on it. Thanks for the recommendation.
Some good came out of that, but there was a long detour into cryogenic computing. They found a way to make gigahertz components, cryotrons. The trouble was, they couldn't make them small, or cheap, or integrated. So it was a dead end. What's come out of NSA over the years indicates that a full cyrotron computer was never built, but some "analytic tools", probably key-testers of some sort, were made. (The WWII Bombe and Colossus machines were key-testers, like Bitcoin miners, not general purpose computers.)