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Do you have any further references about what exact military installation was doing this and when? I’m reading Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson and one of the m
by jds375 7y ago
Do you have any further references about what exact military installation was doing this and when? I’m reading Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson and one of the main characters builds a mercury-based data analysis machine that reads punch cards to analyze communication data in WWII and this sounds eerily similar.
- gumby 7y agosee my reply to the parent post
- triplee 7y agoA lot of that book took into account real life events and people. Unfortunately I don't have specifics on that one, so hopefully the parent does. Also, that book is fantastic, as are the prequels.
- bane 7y agoIIR mercury-based memories part of a larger class of memory called "delay-line memory" that dates all the way back the 1920s. The basic premise is that it uses the time delay of signals propagating in some medium to temporarily "store" a value. The modern analog is the need to refresh DRAM in order to keep the bits flipped the right way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory