AN/FSQ-7: the computer that shaped the Cold War

5 Basic circuitry

The following sections focus on the basic circuitry used in AN/FSQ-7 – a necessary task for understanding and marveling the machine as such. While today’s abundant ultralarge scale integrated circuits²⁸⁰ easily contain hundreds of millions and even billions of active circuit elements in the form of transistors, a simplex AN/FSQ-7 had to make do with fewer than 30,000 vacuum tubes, resulting in a rather straightforward, yet quite powerful architecture for its time.

At first we will focus on the basic waveforms employed throughout the computer system, and a problem quite common in the era of AN/FSQ-7 and its solution will be detailed.

5.1 Introduction

Many of the circuits described in the following sections will look familiar ...