Core Memory Room

10 responses to “Core Memory Room”

1. 

   jurvetson

   Sep 21, 2012 at 5:37 am

   some cool details, from the oldest one with the biggest cores, stitched by hand:
   

   This one has some unusual wiring in the left section:
   

   Late model (maybe into the 80’s) with a tapestry of tightly woven cores, from a fully automated loom. It’s a huge board with 1.5 Mbits in total:
   

   The core memory planes are typically stacked into a 3D box, like this one from the Apollo flight computer:

   

   The magnetic cores within still hold whatever program they had when powered down. Since there are no tapes or archives of the code, it is possible that the only remaining copy of the Saturn V flight program is in cores like this.

   This module holds 114k bits (14 planes with a 128 x 64 fabric of ferrite donuts)… encoding 13-bit instructions, with the first triple-redundant logic. Ultrasonic delay line cache. Destructive readouts. Failure is not an option.

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2. 

   nimosm

   Sep 21, 2012 at 8:17 am

   When I was a kid I asked a university computer studies student about how computers worked and he talked about magnetic rings. I never heard about them again until just now.

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3. 

   seatonsnet

   Sep 21, 2012 at 11:26 am

   I am being initiated into the poetry of electronics.

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4. 

   born1945

   Sep 21, 2012 at 2:03 pm

   This is a cool display.

   The first computer I operated in the US Navy had ring storage. I can recall seeing the rings and the threaded wires. The computer was a Univac, part of the NTDS system. This was in the early 1970s.

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5. 

   McPHX

   Sep 21, 2012 at 2:24 pm

   I work for Honeywell, we have a similar display in the halls of my office.

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6. 

   js.brain

   Sep 21, 2012 at 3:00 pm

   I have seen those fancy core memories, but I was never able to touch them! I started to build electronics projects in the 1990s, of course with totally different memories… 🙂

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7. 

   Niall Oswald

   Sep 21, 2012 at 10:05 pm

   What I’d like to know is whether the people working with these ever dreamed that one day, we’d have thousands of times the capacity of these great ferrite tapestries on something the size of a little fingernail?

   In 30 years’ time, how clunky will today’s technology seem? That’s what I’m excited to discover.

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8. 

   Chucil

   Sep 22, 2012 at 3:30 am

   Thank you for sharing!
   If the hand-stitched pattern is taken to Iran, maybe someone there could weave a distinguished and beautiful Persian rug based on it.

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9. 

   winio_janik

   Sep 24, 2012 at 4:25 pm

   the one from a vcr is probably few vide lines memory to delay lines for sync purposes

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10. 

    Jim Rees

    Sep 30, 2012 at 11:36 pm

    My first home computer had core memory:
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/83025347@N00/543967699/

    Reply