EX-Z55
ƒ/2.6
5.8 mm
1/60
Puzzle Series: What is this, or what do you want it to be?
12 responses to “What’s That? (36)”
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the army has finally created mechanized surveilance honey bees. this is their hive…where they come back to get new solar panels and drop some video onto the grid.
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Bingo Alieness!! and thanks to Ben for sending the beacon out to her.
It is a Memorex core memory board. In the 1960’s into the 70’s, core memory was the industry standard for memory. IBM introduced the first computer with solid state memory in 1971, and the transition took place over the 70’s to DRAM. It’s amazing to see how radically our “memory chips” have changed in the past 35 years. It reassures me that having a new nanotech memory architecture in the next 20 years is not such an impossible idea.
Here, each patch is 4 kilobits and the memory fabric was machine woven. Early on, the ferrite cores were larger donuts and the wires were hand-woven through them. The digital 1 or 0 was associated with the magnetism of the ring that lied at the intersection of rows of x and y wires. The rings got smaller each year, and in an interim manufacturing phase, they were placed on sticky paper to orient them in parallel for a machine weave (and manual debug). In this board, the rings are so closely packed, you can’t see them with the naked eye.
So Ben was right that the shiny lines are copper (wires), and SpicyTuna was right that is was some kind of fabric.
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Congrats Alienness! You’ve been paying attention… Steve has used a version of core memory before in his puzzles!
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Absolutely! This was completely a question of our friendship I must confess. I know he collects them, first, and thanks to him I was introduced to this chapter of computers´ development.
Oh well, and I have myself a good core memory board built-in to remember 😉
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