INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
True tales of IT life are Sharky stock in trade, but the real people in them don&t normally get named
This tale, however, comes from a pilot fish who heard it as a lad from Bob Coveyou, a noted mathematician who worked at Oak Ridge National
Laboratory (ORNL) with fish father, and he worth mentioning because the tale involves what may well have been a computing first.The tale is
from the early 1950s, when Bob was one of several scientists who wrote programs for a unique computer at ORNL called ORACLE, or Oak Ridge
Automatic Computer and Logical Engine
Like other computers of that era, it had enough vacuum tubes to fill a room
It also had a couple dozen cathode-ray tubes for its memory
Each CRT could store 1,024 binary digits (bits) of electrostatic memory in the form of a 32-by-32 array of charged dots spaced a fraction of
an inch apart on the tube flat face.
