Modern differential amplifiers are usually implemented with a basic two-transistor circuit called a “long-tailed” pair or differential pair. This circuit was originally implemented using a pair of vacuum tubes. The circuit works the same way for all three-terminal devices with current gain. The “long tail” resistor circuit bias points are largely determined by Ohm's Law and less so by active component characteristics. The long-tailed pair was developed from earlier knowledge of push-pull circuit techniques and measurement bridges. An early circuit which closely resembles a long-tailed pair was published by British neurologist Bryan Matthews in 1934, and it seems likely that this was intended to be a true long-tailed pair but was published with a drawing error. The earliest definite long-tailed pair circuit appears in a patent submitted by Alan Blumlein in 1936. By the end of the 1930s the topology was well established and had been described by various authors including Frank Offner (1937), Otto Schmitt (1937) and Jan Friedrich Toennies (1938) and it was particularly used for detection and measurement of physiological impulses. The long-tailed pair was very successfully used in early British computing, most notably the Pilot ACE model and descendants, Maurice Wilkes’ EDSAC, and probably others designed by people who worked with Blumlein or his peers. The long-tailed pair has many favorable attributes if used as a switch: largely immune to tube (transistor) variations (of great importance when machines contained 1,000 tubes or more), high gain, gain stability, high input impedance, medium/low output impedance, good clipper (with a not-too-long tail), non-inverting (EDSAC contained no inverters!) and large output voltage swings. One disadvantage is that the output voltage swing (typically ±10–20 V) was imposed upon a high DC voltage (200 V or so), requiring care in signal coupling, usually some form of wide-band DC coupling. Many computers of this time tried to avoid this problem by using only AC-coupled pulse logic, which made them very large and overly complex (ENIAC: 18,000 tubes for a 20 digit calculator) or unreliable. DC-coupled circuitry became the norm after the first generation of vacuum tube computers. A differential amplifier is a type of electronic amplifier that amplifies the difference between two input voltages but suppresses any voltage common to the two inputs. It is an analog circuit with two inputs and and one output in which the output is ideally proportional to the difference between the two voltages.
