> I do recall, however, that one of the Anita nixie calculators had a magnetic > memory - a torsion delay line. It was kind of like a clock spring made out of > stiff wire. An actuator would twist it at one end and the torsion wave would > go round all the coils and appear at the other end some milliseconds later, > where it was sensed and fed back to the beginning. So you could store data in > it, like a very fast tape loop.
I had a couple of calculators that used that kind of memory. One was a Singer/Frieden, I forget the make of the other one. They also used CRTs for display, with some clever logic to vector-trace seven segment digits onto the screen. They both showed a 3-level stack. Nifty devices, until my sister threw them out. I also had a nixie calculator. It was made back in the days when calculators were really expensive, so it had one "math box", and four terminals. It could only make one calculation at a time, but since calculators spend most of their time waiting, this was apparently not much of a problem. It had a bunch of digits, Each terminal had 13 CD66 nixies for the display and a neon bulb for the - sign. It had old-style diode "ROM", with boards covered with arrays of diodes in various patterns. It died when a power supply capacitor failed, making all the nixie displays strobe with an interesting rolling effect as the power line frequency beat with the multiplex frequency. I was young and poor, and stripped the poor thing for parts. I still have one of the display boards, minus one of its CD66 nixies. - John -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to neonixie-l+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send an email to neonixie-l@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/70FEAB4F-FE8B-48D7-B4FE-F5A746A8564E%40mac.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
