Mmmmmmm, doughnuts. That would be quite heavy...640k would
be out of the question.
> 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.
From,
Paul (Quantum Business Systems)
www.quantumsystems.com.au
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