Three Strange Storage Systems of the Vacuum Tube Era

Before transistors and Integrated Circuits, Engineers resorted to creative approaches to store bits.

Paper was the storage medium of choice for the early mechanical computers and tabulators of the late 1800s and early 1900s, but when electronic computers came around in the 1940s, a faster solution was desirable — one that could keep up with the “faster” machines they were attached to.

Mechanical solutions were out — and electronic ones in. But there was a problem of scale, since integrated circuits were still twenty years away, and even the transistor had not been invented yet. Register circuits made out of tubes could be constructed, but it would take at minimum 4–5 tubes and associated discrete components to store a single bit. This was fast but required a lot of space, and a lot of power. Tens of thousands of tubes just to store a kilobyte of data, creating all sorts of cost, power, thermal, and reliability problems.

Delays, Delays

The motivation to build a smaller storage device was high, so they got creative about where they could keep all their bits around for a while. One of the earliest solutions was, to use a wire. Slightly more complex, but basically, a wire. The idea was based on the principle…