Or Botton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>> Skylab lost its happy thoughts and fell out of the sky long before there
>> was a 486.
>So what did it had?
I don't know. Possibly some kind of Intel or Zilog chip, but maybe not
anything we'd recognize today.
>> (I am told, however, that early space shuttles used core-memory
>> computers. I don't know this for a fact, but it's an... intriguing...
>> claim.)
>
>What are "core-memory" computers?
>(Begin Jeprody-style timer music)
"Core memory" was an early, non-semiconductor form of memory. Each bit
was a little ferrite toroid (doughnut-shaped) core wrapped with a pair
of wires. One wire was to magnetize the doughnut, the other was to read
the polarization (direction) of the magnetism. One problem with this
approach was that the act of testing the bit automatically demagnetized
the doughnut: a read-once memory! If you wanted to keep the data, you
had to write it back to the same location immediately after reading it.
And of course, making the memory bigger (more bits) meant making it
physically bigger (more doughnuts, more wires.)
Core memory is long obsolete now, of course. But the word lingers on:
a "core dump" is a memory dump, even if the memory is not made from
little ferrite doughnuts.
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