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.
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.
Oh, my bad, I linked the wrong page!, edited to include both
All this stuff is really cool! Looks like you can use one ring to store multiple bits by using multiple sense wire. So that’s why there are a lot of wires in the images. Seems like there are 16 bits for each core?
I wonder how feasible it is for someone to built their own retro computers by soldering a bunch of nand gates and weaving their own ram and rom. The only problem seems to be getting the ferrite cores in huge quantities (are those still being sold these days?).
I totally want to try, I think ferrite toroids are everywhere, but the material that core/rope memory rings are made of has a specific magnetic response hysteresis which is important.
There goes my dream building my own computer if I survived a nuclear apocalypse.