The Selectron was an early form of digital computer memory developed by Jan A. Rajchman and his group at the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) under the direction of Vladimir K. Zworykin. It was a vacuum tube that stored digital data as electrostatic charges using technology similar to the Williams tube storage device. The team was never able to produce a commercially viable design before magnetic-core memory became almost universal.
Development Development of Selectron started in 1946 at the behest of John von Neumann of the Institute for Advanced Study, who was in the midst of designing the IAS machine and was looking for a new form of high-speed memory. RCA's original design concept had a capacity of 4096 bits, with a planned production of 200 by the end of 1946. They found the device to be much more difficult to build than expected, and they were still not available by the middle of 1948. As development dragged on, the IAS machine was forced to switch to Williams tubes for storage, and the primary customer for Selectron disappeared. RCA lost interest in the design and assigned its engineers to improve televisions A contract from the US Air Force led to a re-examination of the device in a 256-bit form. Rand Corporation took advantage of this project to switch their own IAS machine, the JOHNNIAC, to this new version of the Selectron, using 80 of them to provide 512 40-bit words of main memory. They signed a development contract with RCA to produce enough tubes for their machine at a projected cost of $500 per tube (equivalent to $7000 in 2025). Around this time IBM expressed an interest in the Selectron as well, but this did not lead to additional production. As a result, RCA assigned their engineers to color television development, and put the Selectron in the hands of "the mothers-in-law of two deserving employees (the Chairman of the Board and the President)." Both the Selectron and the Williams tube were superseded in the market by the compact and cost-effective magnetic-core memory, in the early 1950s. The JOHNNIAC developers had decided to switch to core even before the first Selectron-based version had been completed.
Principle of operation
Electrostatic storage The Williams tube was an example of a general class of cathode-ray tube (CRT) devices known as storage tubes. The primary function of a conventional CRT is to display an image by lighting phosphor using a beam of electrons fired at it from an electron gun at the back of the tube. The target point of the beam is steered around the front of the tube though the use of deflection magnets or electrostatic plates. Storage tubes were based on CRTs, sometimes unmodified. They relied on two normally undesirable principles of phosphor used in the tubes. One was that when electrons from the CRT's electron gun struck the phosphor to light it, some of the electrons "stuck" to the tube and caused a localized static electric charge to build up. This charge opposed any future electrons flowing into that area from the gun, and caused differences in brightness. The second was that the phosphor, like many materials, also released new electrons when struck by an electron beam, a process known as secondary emission. Secondary emission had the useful feature that the rate of electron release was significantly non-linear. When a voltage was applied that crossed a certain threshold, the rate of emission increased dramatically. This caused the lit spot to rapidly decay, which also caused any stuck electrons to be released as well. Visual systems used this process to erase the display, causing any stored pattern to rapidly fade. For computer uses it was the rapid release of the stuck charge that allowed it to be used for storage. In the Williams tube, the electron gun at the back of an otherwise typical CRT is used to deposit a series of small patterns representing a 1 or 0 on the phosphor in a grid representing memory addresses. To read the display, the beam scanned the tube again, this time set to a voltage very close to that of the secondary emission threshold. The patterns were selected to bias the tube very slightly positive or negative. When the stored static electricity was added to the voltage of the beam, the total voltage either crossed the secondary emission threshold or didn't. If it crossed the threshold, a burst of electrons was released as the dot decayed. This burst was read capacitively on a metal plate placed just in front of the display side of the tube. There were four general classes of storage tubes; the "surface redistribution type" represented by the Williams tube, the "barrier grid" system, which was unsuccessfully commercialized by RCA as the Radechon tube, the "sticking potential" type which was not used commercially, and the "holding beam" concept, of which the Selectron is a specific example.
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