crazy memory ideas?

Joseph H Allen · 2013-11-06T16:40:52+00:00

Well here is one: Use a selenium-coated laser printer drum pretty much as intended. Impart a charge on it's surface, fire laser to erase charge for a 0 or leave it for a 1, then use some kind of electrometer to read the bit later. Recycle this back to the laser for recirculating memory. I'm wondering if there is any way to make a large scale CCD shift-register memory which can be made at home. I'm imagining tin-foil electrodes glued to some kind of reasonably high-mobility but fully-depleted material.. but is there such a material besides a single-crystal semiconductor? Hmm, which reminds me: does anyone have a good description of how bucket-brigade devices really work? The equivalent schematic the datasheets always show can not possibly work (the mosfet switches will cause charge to be shared between the two capacitors they connect, and not moved in one direction: you would need buffers between stages for the discrete device version of this to work). -- /* AB1GO */ /* Joseph H. Allen */ int a[1817];main(z,p,q,r){for(p=80;q+p-80;p-=2*a[p])for(z=9;z--;)q=3&(r=time(0) +r*57)/7,q=q?q-1?q-2?1-p%79?-1:0:p%79-77?1:0:p158?-79:0,q?!a[p+q*2 ]?a[p+=a[p+=q]=q]=q:0:0;for(;q++-1817;)printf(q%79?"%c":"%c"," #"[!a[q-1]]);}

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krw 12 years ago

They got a "share". It was called "Reconstruction" (AKA bend over).

They remember, alright.

It's the government. You want them to follow the rules?

That was only the beginning.

It's not just the deep South, though. I think it's more of the South's roots are agricultural rather then industrial; more individual rather than collective.

Minnesota always surprised me, though it's like most states with a large, dominate, city. Cities are more collective. If that isn't offset, it becomes an infinite money sink as people vote themselves money, to be taken from others.

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Jim Thompson 12 years ago

Yep. The exemption. I don't know of the "1% tax of 3.8%"... whaazit? ...Jim Thompson

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Greegor 12 years ago

Remember when bubble memory was in use? How did that technology fare as it aged? Is bubble memory still made for some reason?

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Phil Hobbs 12 years ago

It went away because it was too slow, too weird, had serial access, and didn't scale well to smaller geometries.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 USA +1 845 480 2058 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net

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krw 12 years ago

Sure. I worked on some boards using bubble memories.

It didn't age at all. It died an early death - stillborn in fact. May it stay dead.

No, it is not made, for many reasons. Diskettes (remember those?) killed it. And then were in turn killed by USB.

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krw 12 years ago

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Greegor 12 years ago

One description said it was like a rotating disk memory except the platter stayed still while the information rotated around it. It didn't have to be round at all. Sounds a bit like a magnetic core memory.

formatting link

That they called it "Bubble" memory at all was misleading, conjuring a technology where fluid bubbles acted like EEPROMs. Sequential access like core or a hard disk with only one track flying around. I only brought it up because of the "crazy memory ideas?" OP.

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krw 12 years ago

Not at all. The magnetic domains actually moved (more like charge movement in a DRAM - or better example, a CCD).

Not misleading at all. The bubbles were magnetic domains and were easily seen bumping around like bubbles on the top of a fish tank (in polarized light - sorta like an LCD).

Multi-track was also done. It was a dumber idea, though, because it was way too slow to begin with. Making half as slow didn't solve anything.

It was way too expensive to survive. I worked on it and it was fun but I knew it was going to be a short project. It was a crazy idea.

Even crazier was logic done with bubbles. It was good for a pile of patents, though.

It did survive, for a while, in space applications. The technology is quite rad-hard.

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Jon Elson 12 years ago

Years ago some friends of mine and I used to sit around trying to think up the craziest things that could actually work (at least in some fashion). One of them was a computer networking technology that would ship serial ASCII data around on garden hoses, using ultrasonic transducers as receive and transmit elements. Never got around to it, but it had a fair chance of working -- I think.

Jon

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T 12 years ago

Hey, I've actually seen mercury delay lines used for registers on older computers like the PB-250.

And then being the Bell System history buff tha I am I love that they used barrier grid, flying spot, and other way esoteric memory systems on the first fully electronic switching system.

That gradually morphed to core and twistor but that's another time.

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