The biggest vacuum tube computers had about 20000 tubes. That is a difference of 2e9/2e4 or a factor 100000. In other words it would take 100000 of those tube computers to equal your computer. But the speed would still be about a factor of 100000 slower also.
And that tube computer took several large rooms for the tubes, and enough air conditioning to cool hundreds of homes.
No, we would not have easily available computing. We would be using slide rules in school, and telephones to communicate.
I would not think so because every and each and most of the vacuum tubes need lower high voltage or high voltage and filament to heat the electrons as to come to into basic operational function {Because there are triodes,pent odes, hexodes,CRT...etc which have grids auxiliary anodes.} Some tubes are also directly heated vacuum tubes.Obviously the volume of these vacuum tubes compared to semiconductor devices possess greater volume on size and shape.So miniaturization, to my concept to some aspect is still not possible,
But one thing we must admit that when handling big power like Kilowatts and high amperage, we have to stick to the Vacuum tube technology according to the requirements of application because no such semiconductor devices have not been developed as yet so far I know.In pros cons, these two technologies still have in their own places and we nned it.We cannot ignore or avoide it. Thank you.
We would be sitting around fat, dumb and happy waiting on the filaments in something to warm up. As a young man I never thought that little dap of wasted time made any difference. But looking back at the accumulative total hours I wasted waiting on filaments to warm up makes me feel like I got cheated out of some productive hours. I wish you hadn't even brought it up. But maybe the total hours that old engineers spent waiting on filaments to warm up before vacuum tubes became obsolete will be added to the end of our life span. Be that as it may, I am certainly not in any hurry to get on out of here.
Happy Valentines day to all
For semiconductors to not exist the laws of physics would have to be so different that we wouldn't exist either.
We had computers based on vacuum tubes for a few years before the transistor was invented, so I assume that's the technology that would have been pushed forward along the decades.
But would we have been able to miniaturize the technology to such an extent that it would become feasible for companies (or even people) to use computers for their everyday business? Or would we still be stuck in the informational dark ages?
