Coal Fired Computers, Steam Engine, Out of the Ground, STUK, Artefact, Leuven, Belgium

bnr#13 => Coal Fired Computers, Steam Engine, Out of the Ground, STUK, Artefact, Leuven, Belgium

Shift Register - 7400 Series

Object: 53

Shift Register - 7400 Series

Date of origin: 1940s
Author/inventor/context: Texas Instruments

The Shift Register is an early form of computer memory that dates back to the Colossus computer of the 1940s. In the 1960s they were popularized by the Texas Instruments 7400 series of logic chips which introduced the familiar ‘black box’ Integrated Circuit to the electronics industry. Set by a timed sequence of electrical pulse, Shift Registers are simultaneously a mathematical concept, algorithm and hardware chip entangled within computational systems. A core component of digital logic, they control arrays of actuators, encode and decode signals, act as glue between parallel and serial transmissions, multiplex and delay output, reduce wire count in circuits, and store and distribute data to peripheral devices or individual sections of a Central Processing Unit.

Tom Keene