Printable catalog (PDF)
Great looking conference room art — framed core memories!
This was the industry standard for electronic memory before DRAM and SRAM and Flash. Data was stored in the magnetization, or not, of each ring. It is a non-volatile memory, and relatively immune to radiation and soft errors, much like MRAM today.
Many of the rectangular patches are 4K bits. The early ones were woven by hand, and over the years the iron ring sizes shrank and became tightly woven into an electromagnetic fabric.”
(Via Core Memory Room flickr set.)
FEED
Hey! There’s still data on that memory, provided it hasn’t been held up to a VHS Tape eraser or perhaps sat next to a (glass) computer monitor for the past 15 years…
Mike Y
Dallas, Texas
Comment by Mike Yancey — September 23, 2012 @ 2:29 pm
Hi!
You wrote: “Data was stored in the magnetization, or not, of each ring”. It is my understanding that all rings were magnetized, either in one direction or the other.
BTW, your CAPTCHA is very unfriendly to color-blind people. I would normally use an ohmmeter for this kind of challenge, but my ohmmeter does not work on your website.
Regards,
Edgar.
Comment by Edgar Bonet — September 25, 2012 @ 6:54 am