Post #2244274

2023-04-07 00:32 UTC

fascinating to imagine an alternate reality where transistors never worked and people figured out how to miniaturize vacuum tubes, etching arrays of them on metal wafers and building computers. In fact, they could even have built the entire Internet using a series of tubes.

Replies (15)

@DavidBFox@mastodon.gamedev.place 2023-04-07 00:45

@tubetime@mastodon.social What #AdobeFirefly thinks it would look like. #GenerativeAI Prompt: long shot of thousands 1 millimeter tall nuvistors lying on huge printed circuit boards.

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@bikerglen@mastodon.social 2023-04-07 00:48

@tubetime@mastodon.social MEMS before chips! And last I looked, the Internet was a series of tubes.

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@ckape@teh.entar.net 2023-04-07 00:55

@tubetime@mastodon.social I do remember that year or so when SEDs were going to be the hot new display technology and we were all going to get separate CRTs for all of our subpixels

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@StrangeNoises@mastodon.social 2023-04-07 00:56

@tubetime@mastodon.social nah, gimme Babbage-Lovelace engines humming away at nano-scale 😀

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@nyrath@spacey.space 2023-04-07 02:24

@tubetime@mastodon.social that was actually part of the background of the scifi table top role playing game GURPS Lensman.

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@NekoEd@yiff.life 2023-04-07 03:51

@tubetime@mastodon.social So Fallout? :D

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@dec_hl@mastodon.social 2023-04-07 05:46

@tubetime@mastodon.social I think you just invented a new subgenre of science fiction: Tubepunk. 😁

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@th@social.v.st 2023-04-07 06:50

@tubetime@mastodon.social the Vacuum Transistor allows fabrication of chip-scale vacuum tubes on normal CMOS process. These devices switch in the terrahertz range and require neither a heated filament nor a vacuum, since the source-to-drain distance is shorter than the mean free path (which means electrons won't hit any other atoms along the way): https://spectrum.ieee.org/introducing-the-vacuum-transistor-a-device-made-of-nothing

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@shelldozer@oldbytes.space 2023-04-07 14:19

@tubetime@mastodon.social There is progress on the latter, sort of: https://spectrum.ieee.org/introducing-the-vacuum-transistor-a-device-made-of-nothing

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@scrottie@bsd.network 2023-04-07 17:01

@tubetime@mastodon.social Neat! Figured tubes kept the same form factor. Er, up until https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/VX50BA--vox-vx50ba-50-watt-bass-combo-amp and https://www.korgnutube.com/en , much more recently. And curious for your thoughts on those.

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@oven@snabelen.no 2023-04-07 17:45

@tubetime@mastodon.social Ted Stevens approves.

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@bhtooefr@snack.social 2023-04-07 19:30

@tubetime@mastodon.social wait did you make this thread just so you could get to that pun?

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@cerebrate@social.arkane-systems.net 2023-04-07 20:28

@tubetime@mastodon.social In my science-fiction universe, I call this technology "electron plumbing". (While semiconductors did come to be there, electron plumbing still owns the high-power applications.)

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@notthatgreg@masto.ai 2023-04-07 21:03

@tubetime@mastodon.social perfect for building an Interociter

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@karabaic@mastodon.social 2023-12-30 18:23

@tubetime@mastodon.social reminds me of the Robert Symons quote in this piece on cold-cathode traveling wave tubes: “If the transistor had been invented first, the vacuum tube would have been invented immediately afterwards.” https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-quest-for-the-ultimate-vacuum-tube#toggle-gdpr

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