logoalt Hacker News

adrian_btoday at 11:25 AM0 repliesview on HN

Yes, but those were not the standard kind of CRTs that are used in TV sets and monitors.

The CRTs with memory for early computers were actually derived from the special CRTs used in video cameras. There the image formed by the projected light was converted in a distribution of charge stored on an electrode, which was then sensed by scanning with an electron beam.

Using CRTs as memory has been proposed by von Neumann and in his proposal he used the appropriate name for that kind of CRT: "iconoscope".