Williams tube
There were several forms of electrostatic memory tubes in existence in 1949. The best known today is the Williams tube, developed in England, but there were a number of others that had been developed independently by various research labs. The Whirlwind engineers considered the Williams tube, but determined that the dynamic nature of the storage and the need for frequent refresh cycles was incompatible with the design goals for Whirlwind I. Instead, they settled on a design that was being developed at the MIT Radiation Laboratory. This was a dual-gun electron tube. One gun produced a sharply-focused beam to read or write individual bits. The other gun was a "flood gun" that sprayed the entire screen with low-energy electrons. As a result of the design, this tube was more of a static RAM that did not require refresh cycles, unlike the dynamic RAM Williams tube.