Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcmoor | Hacker News Reader

Now I'm curious, do people actually tried to hack vacuum tubes or other big servers that's barely 1MB RAM? It seems like another thing that needs big investment to work properly, unlike those other techs where results can be shown even with little materials.

View on HN

Yeah, there are retrocomputing hobbyists who mess around with sometimes-physically-large computers that were important many decades ago. I don't know if anyone is hacking on vacuum tubes of the kind that you could in principle build a computer with - there's a reason they became obsolete for digital computation almost as soon as the transistor was invented. On the other hand, I personally think it would be neat to try to build a CRT in a garage, which is of course a type of vacuum tube. I don't think this would be an easy garage project, but it does seem like might be tractable for someone who understand physical manufacturing and electronics well, has access to glassblowing equipment, etc.

There are indeed!

Vacuum tube computer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAlnJnYt5do

Making vacuum tubes in a garage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UEfqAWb3fE

> Now I'm curious, do people actually tried to hack vacuum tubes or other big servers that's barely 1MB RAM?

"Barely?"

It's insane to lump vacuum tubes together with servers with 1 MB RAM. My first PC, which I used for a decade, had 640KB RAM. And that was an upgrade from 512 KB RAM. My other PC had only 128KB RAM. None of these were considered the equivalent of (by then long dead) vacuum tubes in their day.

You can get a lot done in 1 MB.

Yeah 1 MB is too big for my part. But I mean is there anyone hacking with computers in 50s when it's still vacuum tubes and to get 100KB RAM you already need "supercomputer".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com