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OK, enough #whirlwind. What came next? Well Whirlwind had pioneered stuff like RANDOM-ACCESS MEMORY (most people used old RADAR tech in the 40s and early 50s for storage: sometimes CRTs with photosensors, which weren't very good, and the most reliable thing was a weird sort of shift register made out of tubes of mercury and some audio equipment: it was real Stone Knives And Bearskins stuff), and the next place to go was clear:

#Transistors!

So they designed a machine they called the "TX-1" for "Experimental Transistor computer, Mark 1" or similar. I say designed, because it was never built, although the TX-0 and TX-2 were.

They built the TX-0 as a really quick and dirty exploration of the technology. It was little more than a test harness for a number of the things they wanted to go into the real computer, although it was Turing-complete and had more RAM than most big fancy valve computers.

The TX-0 comes up in Steven Levy's "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution". So does Margaret Hamiltion: She's the person trying to get some work done on a PDP-6 that the titular Hackers have rewired overnight. I think the book kind of glosses over that this was a moment of some punk kids literally setting back the Apollo guidance computer...

Anyway, the TX-2 is where we FINALLY get into the tape situation. It was called the TX-2 because they learned a LOT from the TX-0, and scrapped the TX-1 design in favour of something else.

A lot of what I know about this comes from a few talks given by the late Wes Clark and his contemporaries. I'll link them individually but here's a really good session where people reminisce about the stuff I'm talking about here: https://youtu.be/ZgPfLWt5FWE

The vegetarian are about cooked through, so I'm going to pause for dinner and resume after.