Delay line memory was a form of computer memory used on some of the earliest digital computers, such as the EDSAC and UNIVAC I.

The basic concept of the delay line originated with World War II radar research, as a system to reduce clutter from reflections from the ground and other "fixed" objects.

A radar system consists largely of an antenna, a transmitter, a receiver, and a display of some sort. The antenna is connected to the transmitter, which sends out a brief pulse of radio energy before being disconnected again. The antenna is then connected to the receiver, which amplifies any reflected signals, and sends them to the display. Objects further from the radar return echos later in time than those located closer to the radar, which the display indicates visually.

Objects at a fixed distance from the antenna always return a signal after the same delay. In order to filter these out, two pulses were compared, and returns with common timing are removed. To do this, the signal being sent from the receiver to the display was split in two, with one path leading directly to the display, and the second leading to a delay unit. The delay was carefully tuned to delay the signals some multiple of the time between pulses (the pulse repetition frequency), that way the delayed signal from an earlier pulse would exit the delay unit at the same time as a newer pulse was being received from the antenna. One of the signals was then inverted, typically the one from the delay, and the two signals were then mixed and sent to the display. The result was that any signal that was at the same location it was in the past was nullified by the inverted signal from a previous pulse, leaving only the moving objects on the display.

Several different types of delay systems were invented for this purpose, with one common principle being that the information was stored acoustically in a medium. MIT experimented with a number of systems including glass, quartz, steel and lead. The Japanese deployed a system consisting of a quartz element with a powdered glass coating that reduced surface waves that interfered with proper reception. The Naval Research Laboratories used steel rods wrapped into a helix, but this was useful only for low frequencies under 1 MHz. Raytheon used a magnesium alloy originally developed for making bells.^[1]

The most practical such system was developed by J. Presper Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering. His solution used a column of mercury with piezo crystal transducers (a combination of speaker and microphone) at either end. Signals from the radar amplifier were sent to the piezo at one end of the tube, which would cause the transducer to pulse and generate a small wave in the mercury. The wave would quickly travel to the far end of the tube, where it would be read back out by the other piezo, inverted, and sent to the display. Careful mechanical arrangement was needed to ensure the delay time matched the inter-pulse timing of the particular radar being used.

For a computer application the timing was still critical, but for a different reason. Conventional computers have a natural "cycle time" needed to complete an operation, the start and end of which typically consist of reading or writing memory. Thus the delay lines had to be timed such that the pulses would arrive at the receiver just as the computer was ready to read it. Typically many pulses would be "in flight" through the delay, and the computer would count the pulses by comparing to a master clock to find the particular bit it was looking for.

Mercury was used because the acoustic impedance of mercury is almost exactly the same as that of the piezoelectric quartz crystals; this minimized the energy loss and the echoes when the signal was transmitted from crystal to medium and back again. The high speed of sound in mercury (1450 m/s) meant that the time needed to wait for a pulse to arrive at the receiving end was less than it would have been with a slower medium, such as air, but it also meant that the total number of pulses that could be stored in any reasonably sized column of mercury was limited. Other technical drawbacks of mercury included its weight, its cost, and its toxicity. Moreover, to get the acoustic impedances to match as closely as possible, the mercury had to be kept at a temperature of 40 degrees Celsius, which made servicing the tubes hot and uncomfortable work.

A considerable amount of engineering was needed to maintain a "clean" signal inside the tube. Large transducers were used to generate a very tight "beam" of sound that would not touch the walls of the tube, and care had to be taken to eliminate reflections off the far end of the tubes. The tightness of the beam then required considerable tuning to make sure the two piezos were pointed directly at each other. Since the speed of sound changes with temperature (because of the change in density with temperature) the tubes were heated in large ovens to keep them at a precise temperature. Other systems instead adjusted the computer clock rate according to the ambient temperature, to achieve the same effect.

EDSAC, the first practical stored-program digital computer, began operation with 512 35-bit words of memory, stored in 32 delay lines holding 576 bits each (a 36th bit was added to every word as a start/stop indicator). In the UNIVAC I this was reduced somewhat, each column stored 120 bits (although the term "bit" was not in popular use at the time), requiring seven large memory units with 18 columns each to make up a 1000-word store. Combined with their support circuitry and amplifiers, the memory subsystem formed its own walk-in room. The average access time was about 222 microseconds, which was considerably faster than the mechanical systems used on earlier computers.

A later version of the delay line used metal wires as the storage medium. Transducers were built by applying the magnetostrictive effect; small pieces of a magnetostrictive material, typically nickel, were attached to either side of the end of the wire, inside an electromagnet. When bits from the computer entered the magnets the nickel would contract or expand (based on the polarity) and twist the end of the wire. The resulting torsional wave would then move down the wire just as the sound wave did down the mercury column. In most cases the entire wire was made of the same material.

Unlike the compressive wave, however, the torsional waves are considerably more resistant to problems caused by mechanical imperfections, so much so that the wires could be wound into a loose coil and pinned to a board. Due to their ability to be coiled, the wire-based systems could be built as "long" as needed, and tended to hold considerably more data per unit; 1k units were typical on a board only 1 foot square. Of course this also meant that the time needed to find a particular bit was somewhat longer as it traveled through the wire, and access times on the order of 500 microseconds were typical.

Delay line memory was far less expensive and far more reliable per bit than flip-flops made from tubes, and yet far faster than a latching relay. It was used right into the late 1960s, notably on British commercial machines like the LEO I and various Ferranti machines. They were also used very successfully in several models of early desktop electronic calculator, including the Friden EC130 (1964) and EC132, the Olivetti Programma 101 desktop programmable calculator introduced in 1965, and the Litton Monroe Epic 2000 and 3000 programmable calculators of 1967.

A similar solution to the magnetostrictive solution was to use delay lines made entirely of a piezo material, typically quartz. Current fed into one end of the crystal would generate a compressive wave that would flow to the other end where it could be read out. In effect, piezoelectric delays simply replaced the mercury and transducers of a conventional mercury delay line with a single unit combining both. However these solutions were fairly rare; building crystals of the required quality in large sizes was not easy, limiting them to small sizes, and thus small amounts of data storage.

A better and wide-spreaded solution was to use piezoelectric transducers only at the ends of the acoustic wave path, which is guided in a quartz glass plate. The path can be folded by reflections at the edges of the plate. Those delay lines were used for delaying the colour signal in TV-Sets for one picture line (64µs in the european PAL- and SECAM system) to get all the colour information together at the same time from a difference signal, which consists of only a part of the full colour signal and is alternating each line.

Electric delay lines are used for shorter delay times (ns to several µs). They consist of a long electric line or made of discrete inductors and capacitors, which are arranged in a chain.
To shorten the total length of the line it can be wounded around a metallic tube, getting some more capacitance against ground and also more inductance due to the wire wounds, which are laying close together.

Other examples are:

• short coaxial or microstrip lines for phase matching in high frequency circuits or antennas
• as well hollow resonator lines in magnetrons and klystrons as helices in travelling wave tubes to match the velocity of the electrons to the velocity of the electromagnetic waves.
• undulators in free electron lasers

Another way to create a delay time is to implement a delay line in an integrated circuit storage device. This can be done digitally or in a discrete analogue method. The analogue one uses charge coupled devices (CCD), which transport a stored electric charge stepwise from one end to the other. Both methods are bandwidth limited at the upper end to the half of the clock frequency, which determines the steps of transportation.

• Acoustic Delay Line Memory – has an image of a Ferranti wire-based system about half-way down the page
• Delay line memories – contains a diagram of the magnetostrictive transducer
• U.S. patent 2,629,827 "Memory System", Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, filed October 1947, patented February 1953
• Litton Monroe Epic 3000 - Shows details of the torsion delay lines inside this electronic calculator of 1967.