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To: Pigboy who wrote (98318)	2/5/2000 8:41:00 PM
From: bhagavathi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Pigboy, OT RE: i gotta agree with Barry...im a little astonished we made it to the moon on tubes. The question is can we make it to the Mars with MOS devices? mula

To: Pigboy who wrote (98318)	2/5/2000 8:52:00 PM
From: Scumbria	Respond to of 186894

Pigboy, im a little astonished we made it to the moon on tubes. Tubes are much less sensitive to radiation than transistors. At one time there was a concern that Soviet aircraft would survive nuclear war better than American planes, for that very reason. Scumbria

To: Pigboy who wrote (98318)	2/5/2000 10:14:00 PM
From: Gerald Walls	Respond to of 186894

im a little astonished we made it to the moon on tubes. I do agree that it's amazing how little computer power the Apollo space craft had on board (like a TI-30 calculator) and also how little they had on the ground. Also, I just read that the Hubble Space Telescope was just upgraded to 486 processors. However, tubes are less radiation-sickness prone than solid state so they might work better in certain environments, especially when you consider that in space they wouldn't even need class containers to retain the vacuum. I've been told that high-power commercial radio transmitters have this big five-foot-tall tube in them to modulate that 100,000 watt signal. How big of a modulator tube could you build on the moon if you didn't need glass, and how much power could it handle?

To: Pigboy who wrote (98318)	2/6/2000 10:19:00 AM
From: rudedog	Respond to of 186894

pigboy - re: im a little astonished we made it to the moon on tubes. At a dinner a few years ago, I met the guy who was the mission controller for Apollo 13 - they guy who ran around saying "failure is not an option!!" in the movie. He started out as an IBM 655 SysAdmin. He said fixing the problems on Apollo 13 was easy compared to keeping a 655 running... but I think he was kidding.

To: Pigboy who wrote (98318)	2/6/2000 9:53:00 PM
From: dmf	Respond to of 186894

OT Old computers, to the moon on tubes, etc. Pigboy, If you get the chance, you'd enjoy the Computer Museum in Boston. They have quite a collection of this stuff. I'm old enough to remember big, airconditioned rooms but staring at the vacuum tubes and realizing how they were used, was a bit unreal. Of course, I like museums of all kinds, Intel's Museum, The Tech Museum in San Jose as well as the more usual and unusual, BFA and Isabella Stewart Gardener, etc. Just a thought ;) dmf