Williams-Kilburn tube
Introduction
The photograph on this page of Williams-Kilburn tube by Bob Harvey as part of the Geograph project.
The Geograph project started in 2005 with the aim of publishing, organising and preserving representative images for every square kilometre of Great Britain, Ireland and the Isle of Man.
There are currently over 7.5m images from over 14,400 individuals and you can help contribute to the project by visiting https://www.geograph.org.uk
Williams-Kilburn tube
Image: © Bob Harvey Taken: 11 Feb 2017
Part of Image, the world's first proper computer, was this mysterious object which looks like a cathode ray tube. Because it was. But it is a very specialised version of a CRT, a charge storage tube. It has a grid like anode behind the main fluorescent anode, upon which charge can be stored, and the state read back by the beam heading for the display. This was the 16 16-bit storage registers of the Manchester Baby, and the concept of charge storage tubes persisted for a while. I was using them in CAD terminals in the late 1980s, and they were common in air traffic control and marine radars, where they were both a display and a data processing device .
Images are licensed for reuse under creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0
Image Location
Latitude
53.477284
Longitude
-2.255047