One of the core memory boards hanging in our office collection… the industry standard for computer memory in the 1960’s. Here you see 18 bytes of memory in 2×3 inches, where each hand-woven ferrite ring can be individually magnetized or not, representing 1 or 0.
Until I took this macro zoom shot, I had not noticed the unusual wiring for the cores on the left. The wiring on the right is standard to core memory arrays (to read and write a magnetic bit to the iron core at the intersection of a particular row and address line).
The core memory arrays would often have parity bits for each data row (for error detection). Perhaps the wiring on the left implements a parity operation. It has repeating loops across pairs of rows. Does this look familiar to anyone?
(The only marking on the 7×9” board is Xak 4292. It has 300 bits in the memory array, with 15 pairs of rows with 10 ferrite cores in each row.)
Leave a Reply