GARTHWILSON wrote:
I hired a tech in 1986 who had previously worked on core memories. It was amazing to me how tiny the cores were that he was describing, and that the memory density was much greater than I expected, like 64KB in the space of a 6" cube, IIRC.
My first job as a professional hardware engineer and programmer was on the original ZIP Mail Translator (ZMT) installed in U.S. Post Offices over 40 years ago. The ZMT was a sort of von Neumann machine and used an 8K Ferro-Cube core memory...that's 8 kilobits, not kilobytes. Most of it was designed around 74-series logic, but program execution and stored data were in the Ferro-Cube unit. That meant, of course, that shutting down the ZMT didn't required reprogramming when power was restored. That was a good thing, as reloading a program meant running a paper tape through an attached Tele-Type machine, which was a lengthy process, assuming the tape didn't break.
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
