> -----Original Message-----
> From: Peter Humphrey <pe...@prh.myzen.co.uk>
> Sent: Sunday, December 11, 2022 3:35 AM
> To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org
> Subject: [OT] Re: [gentoo-user] NAS and replacing with larger drives
>
> On Friday, 9 December 2022 10:34:00 GMT I wrote:
>
> > in the 1970s the national grid was monitored and analysed with a
> > Ferranti Argus 500 machine with 24KB RAM and a 2MB disk. It was common
> > for American visitors to believe that was just driving the control
> > engineers'
> > displays, and where was the main computer?
>
> Er... There was no RAM in those days, not of the type we know today. In fact
> it was 2-microsecond core store. Each tiny ferromagnetic toroid was threaded
> with one X wire, one Y wire and (I think it was) a sync pulse wire. A
> remarkable labour of love to build such a thing.
>
> --
> Regards,
> Peter.
>
Well, it wasn't built with transistors, but it was Random Access Memory. As
opposed to Sequential Access Memory like mercury delay lines. And it was
periodic refresh, just like most modern RAM.
That 24KB though would have been literally 196,608 ferrite cores (assuming it
was an 8 bit byte on that system), and they were probably hand-soldered.
Although it looks like the original Argus line used 12 bit words. So it was
probably a 6 bit byte. Still, a lot of soldering.
Interestingly, the Argus 400 and 500 series was one of the first systems to use
multilayer PCBs and the company had to develop a lot of the techniques for
creating those themselves.
LMP
