Page:Alan Turing - Proposed Electronic Calculator (1945).pdf/47

 A simple circuit to obtain this effect is shown in Fig. 51a. The response is shown in Fig. It differs from the ideal mainly in having its maximum too early. It can be improved at the expense of a less good zero at 2 μs by using less damping, i.e. reducing the 500 ohm resistor. It is also possible to obtain altogether better curves with more elaborate circuits.

The 1000 ohm resistors at input and output may of course be partly or wholly absorbed into the input and output circuits. Further the whole impedance scale may be altered at will.

The fact that the pulse has become greatly widened in passing through the delay network does not signify. It will only be used to gate a clock pulse or to assist in tripping a Kipp relay, and therefore will give rise to a properly shaped pulse again.

(vii) Trigger limiter. We can build up a trigger limiter out of the other elements, although we cannot replace it by such a combination in the circuit diagrams because we are not putting a legitimate form of input into all of them. The circuit is (Fig. 52).

The valve P is merely a frequency divider. It can be used to supply all the trigger limiters. The trigger circuit Q should be tripped by the combination of pulse from P and continuous input, and will itself trip R. The arrangement of two trigger circuits prevents any danger of half-pulse outputs, which we are most anxious to avoid. In order that there might be a half-pulse output the trigger circuit Q would have to remain near its unstable state of equilibrium for a period of time of 1 μs. In order that this may happen the magnitude of the continuous input voltage has to be exceedingly finely adjusted; the admissible range is of the form Ae−t gm/C where A might be say 100 volts (it doesn't matter really) and t is the time between pulses, C and gm the input capacity and mutual conductance of the valves used in the trigger circuit; C/gm might be 0.002 μs (we do not need to allow for Miller effect), so that the admissible voltage range is about 10−200 volts which is adequately small.

 16. Alternative Forms of Storage.

(i) Desiderate for storage systems. A storage system should have a high monetory economy, i.e. we wish to be able to store a large number of digits per pound sterling of outlay: it should also have a high spacial economy. For the majority of purposes we like a form of storage to be erasible, although there are a number of purposes, such as function tables and the greater part of the instruction tables, for which this is not necessary. For the majority of purposes we also like to have a short accessibility time, defining the accessibility time to be the average time which one has to wait in order to find out the value of a stored digit. Normally we shall be interested in the values of a group of digits which are all stored close together, and very often it does not take much longer to obtain the information about the whole group than about the single digit. Let us say that the additional time necessary per digit required is the digit time (reading). We may also define the accessibility and digit times for recording in the obvious analogous way, though they are usually either equal to the reading time or else exceedingly long.

(ii) Survey of available storage methods. The accompanying table gives very rough figures for the various available types of storage and the quantities defined above. This table must not be taken too seriously. Many of the figures are based on definite numerical data, but most are guesses. In spite of the roughness of the figures the table brings out a number of points quite clearly.  Table/