
Dudley Buck's Forgotten Cryotron Computer - nerdonyte
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/heroic-failures/dudley-bucks-forgotten-cryotron-computer
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Animats
NSA put effort into cyrotrons for much of the 1960s and 1970s. NSA's history
says that they got to a successful special-purpose machine (probably a key-
tester), but never went all the way to a general purpose computer.

As CMOS got better and passed the limits of cyrotrons, the cyrotron effort
wound down. NSA continued to try various cryogenic computing concepts, and
there's a published proposal out there for a modern cryogenic computer, but
mostly this seems to have been a dead end. Price/performance just isn't very
good when you need liquid helium and liquid nitrogen and refrigeration gear.

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trhway
>In 1952, Buck’s attention alighted on the chemical element bismuth, which
exhibits strong magnetoresistance: Its electrical resistivity rises
dramatically in response to an applied magnetic field, especially at low
temperatures. At the boiling point of liquid helium (4.2 kelvins), the
electrical resistance of bismuth varies by a factor of tens of millions with
the application of a strong magnetic field. Buck thought this behavior could
be useful for building computers. A relatively small current in a control
wire, and the magnetic field it produces, could bring about an enormous change
in the resistivity of a piece of bismuth, abruptly halting or allowing current
to travel through it. He would have an electronic switch.

sounds like a memristor? There is also
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoresistive_random-
access...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoresistive_random-
access_memory)

