"Once vacuum triodes entered large-scale practical use, companies and laboratories began researching them intensively. All kinds of finely modified vacuum tubes poured forth, and vacuum-tube products entered a period of prosperity. Computers made with tens of thousands of vacuum tubes even appeared." Xiang Xiaotong said.
"Adding a negative voltage to the grid interrupted the current, which was counted as 1. When the current was normal, it was counted as 0. With 0 and 1, binary expression became possible. That was why computers used binary—the hardware determined it."
The older students in the corner of the classroom once again let out enlightened "ohs."
The Youth Class turned their heads in astonishment again, looking at the older students as if they were idiots. How could they not know something like this?
"But the limitations of vacuum tubes were also obvious." Xiang Xiaotong raised her phone. "For example, if we estimate this phone uses four hundred billion vacuum tubes, it would take twenty large cargo ships the size of aircraft carriers to hold them all!"
"At the same time, vacuum tubes consumed a lot of power and had a high failure rate. Suppose I wanted to assign everyone an online exercise. We'd need to build a dedicated thermal power plant, burn seven thousand tons of coal every day to ensure your assignments could be displayed, and assign an entire division of technicians, because a vacuum tube would explode every few minutes. We'd need a huge number of people to check where the explosion occurred and replace it promptly."
Some diagrams flashed across the big screen, displaying the enormous size of vacuum-tube equipment.
"The next generation of vacuum tubes: transistors!" Xiang Xiaotong clicked the mouse, and the PPT turned to a new section.
"The era of vacuum tubes was forged by World War I,