| Amazing. Love it. I remember reading an article back in 1997, when I was a senior in high school. It talked about the future potential in vacuum tubes. It talked about how a radio tube, due to its purely electrical operation (electrons flow in a vacuum instead of a solid), is capable of computing faster than the transistor (for those of you who don't know, microchips are simply devices which hold a bunch of transistorized circuits--transistors, condensers, resistors, and the like). The problem with the radio tube is its size and that it cannot be made as microscopic as modern transistors due to the need for a filament. Some thought was being given to cold cathode tubes. Studies were being done and some success was being made with microchip tube circuits. Still, even with modern innovations, the current tube designs would still make the desktop computer much larger than it is when transistors are used. A problem I see with tubes is fading emission. Perhaps with the digital on and off sequences (0s and 1s), this wouldn't matter, as digital coding only sees on or off. It doesn't see variables. I don't see how tubes can be made as small as the components found within a microchip. It's an interesting idea, though, and it'd be totally cool if tubes were used in computers. Since 1997 I haven't seen any new tube type computers, so we'll see. Thomas |
Will Hodges 
TonyC 