The first computer I ever worked on had 8KB of core memory. It was an old Digital Equipment Corporation pdp-8/e. I loved that machine and its open face tale drives and teletype with paper tape punch and reader and card reader.
Back in middle school my friends and I bought an ancient computer from a bank, a Singer 5800, IIRC. It ran on 240v so we had to unplug the dryer to use it. It had a built-in seat, with the tty, processor, memory, paper tape reader, and printer kinda wrapping around the operator’s seat. It even had a little section you could flip down to bridge the last gap, leaving you totally surrounded. It was a hoot and a half going through the 5’ higher stack of manuals and learning how to use and program it. Inside the memory cabinet, where the 4K of core memory lived, someone had velcroed a horseshoe magnet to the door, with “delete utility” written on it.
Good times.
Hard to believe that got us to the moon
It really is. They did so much more with so much less back then. Their code was massive but had zero fat. So much of our software now consists of self-celebration.
The memory in the two Voyager spacecraft - still in operation more than 45 years after launch, now more than 4 times farther from our Sun than Pluto’s mean orbit - is core. Poke around in https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov
That’s awesome. It’s lasted longer than modern flash does.
And rope memory!
Is that… 32 bytes of memory? Wow, I didn’t know they also came in rope form factor as well.
Some cores appear to touch other neighboring cores. Won’t that cause issues to the core’s magnetic properties?
