雙語暢銷書《艾倫圖靈傳》第8章:水銀延時線(3)
It was Eckert of the ENIAC team who had suggested the use of a delay line to store the pulses of an electronic computer.
There were several ideas involved.
但這裏面存在幾個問題。The pipe, or delay line, would have to cope with pulses separated by only a millionth of a second, and to transmit them unsmudged.
管道，或者說延遲線，需要接收百萬分之一秒的脈衝信號，並讓它們原封不動地進行傳輸。
It was also necessary that the pulses should be stored not just for a thousandth of a second,
此外，脈衝不只是存儲千分之一秒，but indefinitely, which required recirculating them through the delay line again and again.
而是需要永久存儲，這就要讓它一遍又一遍地在延遲線內反覆循環。If this were done naively then the pulses would soon become too blurred to be distinguishable.
如果只是單純地讓它迴流，那麼脈衝很快就會變得非常模糊，以致無法識別。So electronics had to be devised to detect the existence of a (somewhat degenerated) pulse arriving at the end of the line,
所以，必須設計一種電子裝置，來檢測到達末端的（已經略有衰減的）脈衝，and to start off a clean pulse at the beginning—the electronic equivalent of the relay used as a telegraph repeater.
然後從發端重新發送一個乾淨的脈衝。這個裝置有點像電報系統的中繼器，This would have to be combined with the facility to accept pulses from the rest of the computer and to feed them back in as required.
它在計算機內部接收脈衝，再根據要求轉發出去。It was well known that it was advantageous to use a medium other than air for the sound waves, and mercury was already being employed in radar applications.
衆所周知，空氣不是傳播聲波的好介質。雷達系統中使用的介質是水銀，This appropriate element, was to haunt the developments of the next few years.
這種元素，將貫穿接下來幾年的發展。
