(Dr.) Dudley Allen Buck (1927–1959) was an electrical engineer and inventor of components for high-speed computing devices in the 1950s.
He is best known for invention of the cryotron, a superconductive computer component that is operated in liquid helium at a temperature near absolute zero.
He worked part-time at Santa Barbara radio station KTMS until he left to attend college at the University of Washington under the U.S. Navy V-12 program.
In late 1951, Dudley Buck proposed computer circuits that used neither vacuum tubes, nor the recently invented transistor.
[3] It is possible to make all computer logic circuits, including shift registers, counters, and accumulators using only magnetic cores, wire and diodes.
In the next decade, cryotron research at other laboratories resulted in the invention of the Crowe Cell at IBM, the Josephson Junction, and the SQUID.
Dr. Buck, his students, and researcher Kenneth R. Shoulders made great progress manufacturing thin-film cryotron integrated circuits in the laboratory at MIT.
Developments included the creation of oxide layers as insulation and for mechanical strength by electron beam reduction of chemicals.
Per a request by chairman Dr. Louis Ridenour, Solomon Kullback appointed Buck to the National Security Agency Scientific Advisory Board Panel on Electronics and Data Processing that same month.
[15] His biography was published in October 2018, The Cryotron Files by Iain Dey and his son Douglas Buck.