From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: dot at dotat.at (Tony Finch) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2020 17:38:18 +0100 Subject: [COFF] Mercury delay lines In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Adam Sampson wrote: > Dave Horsfall writes: > > > Apart from the beautiful Teletype in the foreground, there was a > > machine with lots of dials in the background; obviously some early > > computer, but not enough footage for me to tell which one, > > There are some shots in this trailer: > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JQmO2fC00E > > The racks are mockups (there's a nice National HRO radio in the middle > of one!), but I think what they're trying to represent is the EDSAC > computer at Cambridge; the noughts and crosses game pictured ran on > EDSAC. A picture of Wilkes with some mercury delay lines and a corner of an EDSAC rack. https://images.computerhistory.org/revonline/images/500004368-03-01.jpg?w=600 There was a lot of loose mercury kicking around on that site. Some of the Victorian lecture theatres I attended as an undergrad were later refurbished for use by another department and the rumours were that they discovered there had been a lot of spillage from old physics demonstrations when they were part of the Cavendish laboratory. More recently (10ish years ago?) my boss was briefly evicted from his office in the Phoenix building after they discovered mercury under the floorboards. The building was not named after the IBM mainframe computer, but because it had been burned down and rebuilt such that the top two storeys looked quite different from the bottom two. Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch http://dotat.at/ Biscay: West or southwest 4 to 6. Moderate, occasionally slight in north. Thundery showers. Good, occasionally poor.