Accumulators
"Its accumulators crackled with barely restrained power."
- E.E. "Doc" Smith
We are not sure which of "Doc Smith's" great space operas this was
from, but it is a great line.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, when new computer architectures were being
tried out monthly, we'd often see some some amazing processor ideas.
Often, they tried to get the most out of each of the machine's
registers, with auto-increment, phased auto-decrement and prefetch and
other such options. Of course, we didn't call them "registers" back
then, we called them "accumulators". so the above quote was hauled out
of storage.
"Doc" Smith, as it turns out, was not referring to computer registers.
He was referring to capacitors. When a big capacitor was filled up with
about all the electric charge its dielectric could handle, it would
start to crackle as electrons sought ground. If you kept charging,
eventually the whole mess would burn out with a big flash.
In other words, our use of the line was not that far off the mark.
