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The Aqualator
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Being number 11 in the series
"What the up-timers don't know that they know"
Fr Nicholas Smithson SJ and Br Johann OSB
Number 11: On Computing, March 1633
A feature of the up-time world that many down-timers long for is their electronics. From radios to phonographs, from public address systems to telephones, from calculators to laptops, everyone longs for the things that come from tubes, transistors and integrated circuits.
In particular we long for the integrated circuit. By the early 1970s up-timer technology had matured past the thermionic valve (the vacuum tube) and the transistor to embrace ICs. Both general purpose ICs and "application specific" ICs were used in almost every device.
Why were ICs so popular with up-time engineers? Prior to the invention of the integrated circuit making complex devices from tubes and even individual transistors was difficult. Some applications required thousands of transistors to be hand-wired into circuits, with an equally large number of other components like resistors and capacitors. The work was time-consuming, error prone, costly and jeopardized reliability.
Another problem—what engineers called “the tyranny of numbers”—also existed. The sheer number of a system’s interconnected transistors and other devices prevented progress. Their size and weight often precluded their use in many devices. Prior to integrated circuits, commercially available computers filled rooms and required other rooms of equipment to provide cooling and power. If one component failed in those rooms full of parts, the entire system could be compromised.
Jack Kilby's invention in 1958 of the integrated circuit made obsolete the hand-soldering of thousands of components, while allowing for Henry Ford-style mass production. In particular, designers wishing to use digital logic for controls and computation were freed to build devices with thousands and even tens of thousands of circuit elements while decreasing size and cost and increasing reliability.
However, we have no illusions that the wonders of the IC age will come to us soon. The refining of single crystal silicon and germanium, the production of masks, circuit boards, and even standard resistors and capacitors are years away. For the next decade at least (and perhaps longer) we of the USE find ourselves in the tube era, and for most of that era tubes will be fragile, hand built and expensive. In regard to electronics, we find ourselves faced not simply with the tyranny of numbers, but the tyranny of scarcity.
This scarcity hits us hardest in field of computation.
Computationally intensive professions such as engineers, designers, architects and aviators, businesses like banking and retail and wholesale trade long for the ease of electronic calculation. The cheapest up-time giveaway four-function calculators are sold across Europe at prices which would ransom a Count. Slide-rules and mechanical calculators are a poor substitute at best, and down-time produced adding machines use scarce machine tools and materials and in any event as yet fare poorly against a skilled abacus operator. What is needed is a substitute for the transistor, and the integrated circuit; something that can be produced now in adequate numbers and with inexpensive resources.
We offer a possible path to a solution.
In the mid 1960s and into the 1970s, lead by researchers at Bendix corporation, a series of developments resulted in the entirety of computer logic elements being designed and built entirely out of unmoving grooves in a solid substrate through which a fluid was pumped. These "fluidic" devices depended on the "coanda effect" (the tendency for a moving fluid to cling to a surface).
An entire suite of fluidic devices was designed including all the critical elements of computer logic; NAND and NOR gates, flip flops, adders, shift registers and more.
While not the subject of this paper, the authors note that fluidic amplifiers were designed and built which could amplify sound cleanly and with reasonable precision with no electronics and no moving parts.
However, up-time, these technologies were a solution in search of a problem. Jack Kirby had
That ends the preview. Probably in the middle of a sentence. Sorry.