Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

  > Back in his lab, he entered the sketched coordinates—called bézier
  > control points, first used in the design of automobile bodies—on a
  > Tektronix storage tube, an early computer memory.
Urg. Not a ‘memory’ in the computer sense, not being readable by the computer. What this means is that he used a Tektronix graphics terminal that had a self-persisting CRT display.¹

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-view_bistable_storage_t...

Edit: Teapot on a Tektronix 4014: https://youtu.be/bZOrL7f1-kE



Incidentally, there was in fact CRT-based RAM at one time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_tube?wprov=sfla1


Original author here. Thanks for catching this; the mistake was introduced in the editing process. Should be fixed now.


Arguably it's a real example of the fabled Write-Only Memory. :)




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: