[summa_tech]

Tubes can also just be very _clever_ in a way that transistors generally are not. For instance, counting tubes that would contain a decimal counter in a single glass bubble (that's quite a few transistors even in TTL, and about twice as many in CMOS). Multiple approaches to building such tubes existed. This is one:

https://lampes-et-tubes.info/cd/cd053.php?l=e

Or the complicated and impressive storage tubes, that would fit 16 kbits of RAM in a single CRT:

https://lampes-et-tubes.info/sc/sc022.php?l=e

By the way, this website is one of my favorite finds on the Internet and very long-running.

[fc417fc802]

That RAM component is wild. Do you know if there are any equivalent analog RAM components today? By which I mean RAM elements that are similarly capable of storing an analog as opposed to a digital signal.

[summa_tech]

I don't think I've seen anything sufficiently RAM-like. The classic sense amplifier architecture tends to make this impractical. I guess modern Flash can store a few levels but that's a far cry from actual analog storage.

For a while, you could get things like bucket-brigade CCDs for analog signals (used for reverbs and suchlike). They're still made in small quantities, I think, by boutique operations like Xvive.

Also, there was the ISD ChipCorder, which was actual analog Flash. (Current devices are digital, but the old ones were for a while sold as "MLS ChipCorder" by Nuvoton.)