Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!mks.com!chrisp
From: chrisp@mks.com (Chris Phillips)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Mercury delay lines
Message-ID: <1990Jun8.170919.24560@mks.com>
Date: 8 Jun 90 17:09:19 GMT
References: <3040@softway.oz> <2694@wrgate.WR.TEK.COM>
Reply-To: chrisp@mks.com (Chris Phillips)
Organization: Mortice Kern Systems, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Lines: 20

In article <2694@wrgate.WR.TEK.COM> kend@mrloog.WR.TEK.COM (Ken Dickey) writes:
>In article <3040@softway.oz> adjg@softway.oz (Andrew Gollan) writes:
>>I have always liked the idea of mercury delay lines, 
>...
>>Can anyone tell me what machines had these memories?
>
>
>Maurice Wilkes's EDSAC, the first stored program to operate, used mercury
>
>-Ken Dickey			kend@mrloog.WR.TEK.COM

I remember going to a lecture ('80 Forsythe Lectures?) at Stanford by Wilkinson
where he reminisced about programing this machine. I was working on microcode
for a machine with a pipeline architecture at the time and found the techniques
he described very similar to what we were doing, even to the sort of timing
drawings they used to design their algorithms ! They had used the pipes to store
partial results for computations and this allowed them to get very effective 
computational speed with SLOW hardware.

Chris Phillips chrisp@mks.com -or- chrisp@telly.on.ca