They are mentioned in Turing's Cathedral [0], an excellent book that was recommended here on HN. Here's an interesting quote:
There were two sources of noise: external noise, from stray electromagnetic fields; and internal noise, caused by leakage of electrons when reading from or writing to adjacent spots. External noise could, for the most part, be shielded against, and internal noise was controlled by monitoring the "read-around ratio" of individual tubes and trying to avoid running codes that revisited adjacent memory locations too frequently -- an unwelcome complication to programmers at the time. The Williams tubes were a lot like Julian Bigelow's old Austin. "They worked, but they were the devil to keep working" Bigelow said.
This phenomenon is very similar to the recently discovered row hammer vulnerability of DRAM memory, except it predates it by roughly 65 years.
I learned about Turing Machines as a CS student a long time ago, and got the false impression that he was only involved in theoretical pursuits (theory of computation, algorithms for cryptography, etc.). It was only after reading this book that I learned how much he had contributed to the design of actual computing hardware.
> trying to avoid running codes that revisited adjacent memory locations too frequently
And today, it's exactly the opposite: we try to write code that has as much locality of reference as possible so that we can avoid expensive cache misses.
There were two sources of noise: external noise, from stray electromagnetic fields; and internal noise, caused by leakage of electrons when reading from or writing to adjacent spots. External noise could, for the most part, be shielded against, and internal noise was controlled by monitoring the "read-around ratio" of individual tubes and trying to avoid running codes that revisited adjacent memory locations too frequently -- an unwelcome complication to programmers at the time. The Williams tubes were a lot like Julian Bigelow's old Austin. "They worked, but they were the devil to keep working" Bigelow said.
This phenomenon is very similar to the recently discovered row hammer vulnerability of DRAM memory, except it predates it by roughly 65 years.
[0] https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dMK3P6B3WgcC
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer