Collaborate Disseminate
In the 1967 movie The Graduate, a wise older man gives some advice to the title character: plastics. Indeed, plastics would become big business. In 1962, though, a computer-savvy character …read more Continue reading What’s a Transfluxor?
One of our favorite retro hardware enthusiasts, [CuriousMarc], is back with the outstanding tale of preserving Apollo Program software, and building a core rope reader from scratch to do it. …read more Continue reading Saving Apollo by Decoding Core Rope
We live in a world where most of us take the transistor for granted. Within arm’s length of most people reading this, there are likely over ten billion of them …read more Continue reading GLASNOST is a Computer That Makes Transparency A Priority
Many Hackaday readers will be familiar with the term “core memory”, likely thanks to its close association with the Apollo Guidance Computer. But knowing that the technology existed at one …read more Continue reading Supercon 2022: Andy Geppert is Bringing Core Memory Back
Do you know core memory? Our prehistoric predecessors would store data in the magnetic fields of ferrite rings, reading out the ones and zeroes by setting the magnetic field and …read more Continue reading VCF East 2023: Andy Geppert Talks Core Memory
We’ve seen a few interesting magnetic core memories on these fine pages over the years, but we don’t recall seeing too many user programmable magnetic core memory devices. This interesting …read more Continue reading Soviet-Era Auto Dialler Uses Magnetic Rope Core Memory
There’s nothing quite like going to a museum and being given a tour by a docent who really knows their way around the exhibits. When that docent has first hand …read more Continue reading Taking a Walk Down [Computer] Memory Lane
For the vast majority of us, computer memory is a somewhat abstract idea. Whether you’re declaring a variable in Python or setting a register in Verilog, the data goes — somewhere — and the rest really isn’t your problem. You may have deliberately chosen the exact address to write to, …read more
What do you do when you’ve bought some old Soviet core memory modules on eBay? If you are [CuriousMarc], you wire it up to some test connectors and use your test bench to see if the core memory still works. Spoiler alert: it does.
While it seems crude by today’s …read more
What do you do when you’ve bought some old Soviet core memory modules on eBay? If you are [CuriousMarc], you wire it up to some test connectors and use your test bench to see if the core memory still works. Spoiler alert: it does.
While it seems crude by today’s …read more