Re-creating the first flip-flop - A fundamental component of computers turns 100 [Resources_Hands On

Abstract

ANY ENGINEERS ARE FAMILIAR WITH THE NAMES OF LEE DE FOREST, WHO INVENTED THE amplifying vacuum tube, or John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley, who invented the transistor. Yet few know the names of William Eccles and F.W. Jordan, who applied for a patent for the flip-flop 100 years ago, in June 1918. The flip-flop is a crucial building block of digital circuits: It acts as an electronic toggle switch that can be set to stay on or off even after an initial electrical control signal has ceased. This allows circuits to remember and synchronize their states, and thus allows them to perform sequential logic. The flip-flop was created in the predigital age as a trigger relay for radio designs. Its existence was popularized by an article in the December 1919 issue of The Radio Review, and two decades later, the flip-flop would find its way into the Colossus computer, used in England to break German wartime ciphers, and into the ENIAC in the United States.