
Dudley Buck's Forgotten Cryotron Computer - spectruman
http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/dudley-bucks-forgotten-cryotron-computer#.U0hH31rpCqg.hackernews
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cyanoacry
This is absolutely fascinating. I didn't realize that today's nanofab labs
used technology that was available in the 1950's (e-beam lithography is pretty
common, with a second contender for nano-scale structures being FIB[1]
milling).

The article's amazing for being a look into a future that could've been. A
number of physics tools that are around now depend on microscale cryogenics,
but they're still fairly rare (like SQUIDs[2]).

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focused_ion_beam](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focused_ion_beam)
[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQUID](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQUID)

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gaze
There's quite a large effort in superconducting qubits, superconducting
quantum limited amplifiers, at least one company doing rapid single flux
quantum circuitry. Superconducting circuits are reasonably popular.

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cyanoacry
Wow, that's neat! Has any of this technology made it out of the lab?

It feels like the main limit to mass production of this technology (if people
wanted it) is the cryogenics system involved. What other barriers (other than
lack of demand) are there to, say, placing a superconducting device in a mass-
market product?

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kordless
I'd like to see some of the labs providing APIs to some prototypes, sorta like
this random number generator:
[http://qrng.anu.edu.au/index.php](http://qrng.anu.edu.au/index.php)

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dang
It's hard to imagine a more perfect HN post than this one.

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boygobbo
Agreed. One of the best links I've ever followed from HN.

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lifeisstillgood
It's fascinating to realise the amount of herd-like behaviour there is in all
walks. Crypto switching clearly had some promise but was essentially abandoned
when semiconductors reached a form of escape velocity. The same can be seen in
Russian work on phages instead of anti-bacteria - strange that we do not
parallelise our r&d

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wglb
And a little more detail:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dudley_Allen_Buck](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dudley_Allen_Buck)

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Turing_Machine
Died at 32. What a tragedy.

Googling around indicates he died suddenly of pneumonia-like symptoms. He was
working with chemicals whose fumes could have caused that (HCL, e.g.).

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kencausey
There is speculation on this at the end of the IEEE article.

