Actually, we’re not talking the kinds of vacuum tubes used in those early computers, but rather vacuum transistors: the same physical idea, just shrunk right down to miniscule dimensions.

The tubes in question are a few 1Ж29Б-В and 6Н21Б tubes, a vacuum pentode and dual triode, respectively. Add in a few diodes, and that meets the requirements for being sufficient to build a ...

This means that given the resolution of the tube or the image projected onto the tube is not higher than the stripe filter (to allow all 3 colour stripes to be over a “pixel” of the same value ...

Unlike the tubes of old, however, NASA's vacuum-channel transistors measure the gap between electrodes, not in millimeters but in nanometers. Making them nanoscale has a couple of key advantages.

Which is why NASA's Ames Research Center is going back to the future with its new vacuum transistor -- a nanometer-scale vacuum tube that, in early testing, has reached speeds of up to 460GHz.

The next step for the group is to scale down the vacuum tubes and explore their many applications. If their research pans out, the computers of the future may be using technology from a century ...