alt Hacker News> In 1954, Eiichi Goto invented the parametron, a logic device leveraging nonlinear parametric oscillation with two ferrite cores. Unlike the vacuum tube and early transistor circuits prevalent at the time, the parametron offered remarkable stability, requiring minimal maintenance compared to vacuum tubes with short lifetime and costing significantly less than both vacuum tubes and nascent transistors. Its simplicity and reliability made it an ideal foundation for computer design. Early applications showcased its superior fault tolerance over competing technologies, such as vacuum tubes with relatively short-lifetime, slow electromechanical relays, and unstable point-contact transistors.
I think that overstates the case for the parametron though.
Even compared to contemporary vacuum tubes they were slower. Contemporary bleeding edge vacuum tube computers could reach Mhz frequencies. Parametrons were 10-15kHz.
The supposed power benefits depended on state. At idle they were significantly more efficient but the more work they did and the faster you tried to run them the exponentially more electricity they required (and heat they generated).
Lastly because the early ones were lower frequency they required physically larger inductors. Contemporary vacuum tube computers took up similar amounts of space due to cooling constraints but parametrons were bulky in ways you couldn't fix.
Parametrons were a dead-end technology almost from the get-go due to physical scaling limits. Even the earliest use of discrete transistors blew them out of the water beyond any hope that some magical physical scaling would rescue them.
Abandoned technologies are usually abandoned for very good reasons not just because they happened to lose the race or get backed by the wrong companies. No amount of investment was ever going to help parametrons catch up with transistors - just as no amount of investment was going to help vacuum tubes catch up either.