The front panel of the DEUCE featured two CRT displays : one showed the current contents of registers, while the other showed the content of any one of the mercury delay line stores.
12.
A mercury delay line consisted of a long tube filled with mercury, a mechanical transducer on one end, and a microphone on the other end, much like a spring reverb unit later used in audio processing.
13.
This patent focused on mercury delay lines, but it also discussed delay lines made of rotating disks to transfer data to a read head at one point on the circumference from a write head elsewhere around the circumference.
14.
:: : : : Thanks for catching my error . " " When mercury delay lines came up for consideration as internal memory, Lt . Colonel Gillon, as the responsible supervisor for the Ordnance Department, insisted on the tried and tested decade ring counters in spite of the inherently reduced storage capacity.
15.
Flowers, the designer of Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic computer, was committed elsewhere and was unable to take part in the project, although his team did build some mercury delay lines for ACE . The Telecommunications Research Establishment ( TRE ) was also approached for assistance, as was Maurice Wilkes at the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory.
16.
"Stored-program computers were also being developed by other researchers, notably the National Physical Laboratory's Pilot ACE, Cambridge University's EDSAC, and US Army's EDVAC . The SSEM and the Mark 1 differed primarily in their use of Williams tubes as memory devices, instead of mercury delay lines . "-- Fatuorum 17 : 01, 16 February 2009 ( UTC)
