Against the kind of radiation encountered in space or against the kind of EMP effects that might be encountered in a really-bad-day situation I don't think much electronics is just by its nature rad-hard you have to take further steps, not even vacuum tubes.
I read that neon lamps are an exception they appear to absorb enormous amounts of gamma ray energy with little degradation to their performance or firing/maintaining voltage specs
Core is slow - the practical limit is around 1 us cycle time. The core drivers need to switch appreciable power fast, and it seemed that 1 us core drivers worked for long times, but
800 ns core drivers started to soften pretty quickly.The soft drivers did not get caught until there were many together controlling the same core, so when a repair was started several drivers had to be exchanged.
For a single bit, there were three lines through the core: X and Y to select the word and Z/sense to read and select the bit.
-- -TV
Some systems were designed to operate during WW III (when not directly hit). The required radiation levels were so high that you would have been dead or at least uncapable of operation due to radiation sickness within hours or at least a few days.
ome other kind of useless crap that has to store some small number of bits permanently but can be changed by operator. Maybe some kind of comm crypto gear and the stored bits are a key.
Probably has some ICBM or SLBM launch codes still in the core.
I had some US-made core memory like ca. 1970, surplus then. A megabyte was the size of a refrigerator. I only had one bare plane, 4096 bits IIRC, from some outfit like Meshna. Got it to work with some ancient OC70 (??) transistors I pulled from some surplus European telecom equipment.
Maybe this one, in fact:
--Spehro Pefhany
Hypersonic glide vehicles that don't blow up?
--Spehro Pefhany
speff wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:
cite for all of these 'hypersonic glide vehicles'.
Ours are hypersonic payload delivery vehicles.
Theirs likely barely carry their fuel. Ooops, nothing left to blow up.
In PDP8, if you gracefully powered down, BASIC would still be there when yo u restarted. I found that if you ran a little BASIC program, that program would still be running if BASIC was restarted.
This was an accidental discovery, when our rival high school got hold of ou r PDP8 for the summer. I had a BASIC program which didn't type "INPUT?" w hen it wanted some characters. It just said "READY" as if it had halted. If you typed in some lines of code, it would happily take them and discard them. Then you typed "RUN."
It replied: "I CAN'T I AIN'T GOT NO LEGS."
There were other wise-ass answers to all the keyboard commands.
I heard that it took them several days of classes to discover the existence of "CTRL-C" in the manual. They really really wanted to avoid running the many K of papertape for forty minutes to reload everything from scratch. (Hmm, maybe they didn't even have access to our tape collection.)
I didn't get in trouble. The math teacher asked me that next september, wh at was it that I ran just before they shut down for the last time in June? I "didn't remember," thus avoiding everlasting 1975 computer fame in upsta te NY.
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