Optics and Photography in the Flying Spot Store

The experimental electronic switching system uses as its large, semipermanent memory a flying spot store which has been developed to meet the needs of the system.* The flying spot store holds the telephone translation records and the operational program. Because it is desirable to handle this information on a word-organized basis, many parallel optical channels are desired. Stores of several capacities and configurations have been proposed. 3 Discussion in this paper will be limited to the optical and photographic problems of an initial laboratory model flying spot, store assembled to show the feasibility of the switching system at as early a date as possible,2 and to bench tests of an optical configuration proposed for a store of approximately two million bits capacity. In each instance, reference is made to optical channels containing the stored information and to the optics of the closed-loop beam positioning servo. * The system was described in a paper 1 in a previous issue of this publication. The flying spot store 2 has been described in a previous issue and system considerations 3 of the flying spot store are discussed elsewhere in this issue. These articles provide pertinent background for this paper. ·103