I got this from the slowspeedwire Yahoo group:
IEEE Spectrum published an article earlier this week that describes how the original flip-flop circuit was designed and built. According to the article, Re-creating the First Flip-Flop, the circuit was first invented in 1918 and used as a trigger relay for radio designs. An article in the December 1919 issue of The Radio Review popularized the circuit, which used two vacuum tubes!
Steve says
I had no idea there was a vacuum tube version of this circuit that long ago! The first time I remember reading about flip-flop circuits was back in the 1970’s when I became interested in computers. Combined with gate circuits like the NAND and AND the Flip-Flop formed the elemental components of CPU’s which at that time were solid state. I find it very fascinating to learn this circuitry was around a hundred years ago. I suppose that the Flip-Flops in the Eniac had to also be tube based, it just never occurred to me that radio would be the first use of this technology. It makes me wonder just how much of computer technology was first developed in radio. Now we connect computers to radios for digital mode communications so it seems the circle of interconnectedness is never ending.
I worked in mainframe computer rooms in the late 1970’s through the 1980’s and on until 2012 when I retired, in operations support and consulting, and up until recently the only relationship I thought they had with radio was the RF emissions of the large disc drives – if you took a radio into the room you could tune in and hear the drives at work. Oddly, it was my experience with radio in the Army that would lead me into the data processing field.
Now with SDR transceivers we have a deeper relationship between computers and radio than has ever existed. It seems this is another case of back to the future!