'The Cryotron Files' Review: Taking the Cold War to Subzero
The story of a little-known invention that was, for a time, the front-running technology in the quest to build the fastest, smallest computers.
By Phil Lapsley
Oct. 11, 2018 8:52 pm ET
Our lives are secretly ruled by transistors. They power our computers and, with them, modern society. Today's most advanced microchips pack more than 21 billion transistors onto a single piece of silicon slightly larger than your thumbnail.
But in the 1950s, when computers were still in their infancy, the transistor's dominance was far from settled. In an age of bulky and power-hungry vacuum tubes, the U.S. military and American industry searched desperately for some way to speed up and shrink computers for defense and commercial applications. In "The Cryotron Files," Iain Dey and Douglas Buck tell the story of a little-known invention called the cryotron—a liquid-helium-cooled superconducting competitor to the transistor that was, for a time, the front-running technology in the quest to build the fastest, smallest computers. Their interesting book weaves together the biography of the cryotron's inventor, Dudley Buck of MIT (the father of one of the book's authors), with a history of key aspects of Cold War defense programs. Along the way we are given an insider's look at the 1950s military-industrial complex and the ease and informality with which academia, the military, intelligence agencies and industry collaborated.
Born in 1927 in San Francisco, Dudley Buck as a teenager fit the now-stereotypical mold of an engineering and scientific prodigy: He built his own radio transmitters, cooked up homemade explosives and played clever pranks on anyone he could. By 1944, with World War II in full swing, the 17-year-old Buck enrolled in a program designed to attract the nation's best students to become naval officers. He graduated in 1948 from the University of Washington as Ensign Buck and was assigned to the Navy's cryptography and code-breaking team. There he was set to work on an early computer called ABEL; his inventiveness and enthusiasm impressed a number of senior people who would wind up at the future National Security Agency and who would support him throughout his career.
In 1950 Buck completed his naval service and became a graduate student in electrical engineering at MIT, working for Prof. Jay Forrester on Whirlwind, a massive Pentagon-sponsored computer that took up 2,500 square feet of floor space and comprised 5,000 vacuum tubes. Whirlwind was intended to track enemy aircraft, predict their course, and vector fighters to intercept them. Buck found himself swept up in the project and made strong contributions. He stayed in touch with his friends in the Navy, passing on groundbreaking research from MIT. "There was nothing unusual in this flow of information," Messrs. Dey and Buck write. "In 1950, ideas moved fluidly across academia, the military, and a handful of emerging computer giants—such as IBM and Raytheon. . . . The line that marked where the state ended and the private sector began was blurry at best."
It was in 1952 that the National Security Agency was founded, and Buck—while still a graduate student at MIT—began consulting with many of his former naval colleagues, now at the NSA, on the technology that would underlie future computers. The transistor was an option, of course, but, in the words of one historian, "even the people who made the transistor were thinking, 'Okay, what's next, what's the next device?' Clearly the transistor was better than the vacuum tube. Obviously, there's going to be something that's better than the transistor."