Talk:Ferranti Argus

message: Think you meant 8 November 2007. Doesn't appear on the main page today but is shown in the archive.Dsergeant 08:06, 9 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Excellent, thanks! Maury (talk) 12:59, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Did you Know

message: I'm afraid this article still reads like a technical service manual: we don't need the time the machine took to compute an addition, the voltages it used, or even the differences between the models.  What would be useful would be a better historical description, to justify this article meeting Wikipedia:Notability, and some serious editing for style (see Wikipedia:Manual of Style). Michaelbusch (talk) 17:27, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I realize this is an old comment by a retired Wikipedian, but I respectfully disagree. The Argus technical specs are very much of interest in context, and I really can't imagine why they might not be. There's certainly no level of detail here that can't be found in any other computer article, say the Atari 8-bit family or Mac Pro. As to notability, this is well established in the list of references, and I am equally baffled about the basis for this comment. There are no specifics in terms of style (other than those mentioned above), and having been involved in writing the MoS at times, I'm fairly sure we've done a fair job following them.
Or maybe I'm completely full of crap. So I'll ask, does anyone else have problems with the overall "style" of this article? Maury Markowitz (talk) 11:30, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
replies: text:  Comments from 2008 (and certainly earlier) often seem bizarre in what they regard as either important or notable. I'd like to see this article expand, but there's nothing in here that I'd remove. Andy Dingley (talk) 11:38, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Style

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: This section claims that the Mullard OC71 transistors used in this design were developed for use in hearing aids. There is no ref for this (or indeed the 'hearing aid computer' name). The OC7x series was a general purpose alloy junction audio transistor hand selected into three types - OC70 (low noise), OC71 (general purpose), and OC72 (high current). A bit later Mullard/Philips refined the process to improve HF performance yielding the OC44 (HF), OC45 (IF) and OC46 (switching).
While OC71s were certainly used in some late 50s hearing aids, they weren't specifically developed for that purpose. That's not to say that there wasn't a widely held belief within Ferranti that they were, though. --Ef80 (talk) 17:06, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: The term appears in the original Aylen document, which states "using low power hearing aid transistors" right in the abstract along with many additional mentions within. The most detailed is "Maurice Gribble developed a prototype digital controller around 1956 using low-frequency junction transistors meant for hearing aid use (25 kHz) made by Mullard known as OC71.37". That seems pretty direct to me. As you say, this might simply be Ferranti's belief, but for now I think we have enough to leave the claim in the article. Maury Markowitz (talk) 18:35, 1 August 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: OK. It's certainly not a sufficiently important point to lose sleep over. There may have been an OC71 subtype with characteristics originally suited to hearing aid use - low voltage requirements maybe, or low leakage. Transistors of that era had a wide spread of characteristics and were individually hand selected for particular applications. Ef80 (talk) 09:13, 2 August 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Hearing aid computer"