On Wednesday 27 October 2004 02:16 pm, Darrell Cormier wrote:
Just curious if any of you have every worked with a machine that used core memory. If I remember correctly you basically had a cage of "boards". Each board was an x-y grid of fine wire and around each intersection of the wires was a ring of some ferrous oxide material. A current was applied to a certain x-y coordinate to charge the ring thus representing a binary 1. This was a system that had a destructive read which required you to write back what you just read.
I have never used one myself but one of my college instructors had one of these cages of core memory modules from a machine he had used in his youth. Quite interesting.
Most mainframes had core memory until the early 70's. Worked on a lot of them.