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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.
