OT: 30th anniversary of the Challenger

You indicated your age was 6 when Challenger blew up, so it was about 2 years before you were born when bubble memory was touted as the next big thing. The USAF had a computer made around it, but I don't know if it was used for more than experiment.

It used magnetized areas of a flat substrate, so very different from core.

Just checking; it's been a while since I used either.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

A core memory could hold kilobytes of data, e.g. 32x32 plane and 36 planes (36 kilobits), while a semiconductor chips in the 1960's could hold 4 -16 bits.

The ropes were ROM, programmed by stitching.

I have seen one copy of the Apollo computer (size 30x30x30 cm, I think it was called a cubic foot computer) in the former Boston computer museum in the 1980's.

Adjacent to the actual computer, there was an Apollo computer simulator with keyboard and display and the visitor was asked to enter some rocket burn parameters. IMHO. the user interface was quite similar to mid 1970's programmable calculators like the TI-56.

There's no such thing as core without write lines, it was a destructive readout so the bits had to be re-written. He must be talking about non-magnetic core memory- must be going way back.

There were all sorts of weird magnetic memories. Cores, rods, thickfilm, magnetic sheets. Bubble was serial shift-registers made with moving magnetic domains. Intel invested big in bubble.

Jukeboxes used core memory, one giant core per record-to-be-played. If

5 people paid to queue up a song, it got played once. If somebody pulled the plug (which happened often in some bars) it would remember requests after powerup.

The coin box pushbuttons generated the X-Y drive to switch a core. S/N was great with the giant cores.

Disks seem to be hanging in there. $30 a terabyte roughly.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

I'm generally pro-nuke myself, despite living near the Indian Point plant in Buchananan NY. One of the main problems is that running a nuke plant is (nearly always) so boring that you can't keep the best people. The Perrow book is sociology, not engineering, though he does a good job on the tech within his limits. It's not expensive, and it's an excellent read.

Well, it was the Soviet Union. You're too young to remember what that meant. (Personally I miss the Cold War--back then the commies were mostly overseas.) ;)

The one I'm mainly advocating is the Vaughan book on the Challenger Launch Decision. Really first class--she came in expecting it to be a case of Machiavellian management risking lives for the sake of their own interests, but she turned 180 degrees during her research. I have a lot of time for people who are willing to do that if the facts point that way.

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 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

Bubble memory was sort of the Pacman of storage--high density for the time, but serial-access only and schlooooowwwww.

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 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

I don't know if there is a schematic anywhere, but it did have wires threaded through rings, and the wire either went inside a ring or past it to produce a 1 or a 0. That sounds like it must have been magnetic, and implies that they were permanent magnets.

In addition to this, there are very few new nuclear projects in the industrialized world in the last 30 years, so the most bright people try to stay away from the nuclear industry.

BTW, a Canadian nuclear company tried to hire PDP-11 assembler programmers to maintain their spent fuel system to 2050, did they get anyone ?

I did that once. They were just pulse transformers, no saturation, no permanent magnets. A word line would snake around, through bit cores or not, to make 1s or 0s.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Correction: SR-56

Another fun engineering-sociology book is "The Hubble Wars."

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

I remember a bit - I was certainly old enough by 1991 to recognize the collapse of the Soviet Union was a big deal, and I listened to the start of the Gulf War on a radio in my basement (working on model rockets, naturally.)

The early 1980s I don't recall that well, but IIRC there was a lot of tension at the start of the Reagan administration. I knew enough to know that there were some bad guys that had these things called "nuclear bombs" they could drop on us and hurt a lot of people, and was definitely scared sometimes.

I also remember Yakoff Smirnoff. "What a country!"

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Acoustic delay line memory was pretty cool, I guess it was used in some early electronic calculators.

A solenoid gives a huge long line of wire a twist and the waves go round and round...

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I was in Moscow the day that Reagan was elected. There was some cheering amongst us Americans.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

I'm not surprised. In some ways the Soviet Union was at its most aggressive since the 1960s, with the invasion of Afghanistan

Because they were doomed. Even as early as 1982 some folks saw the writing on the wall, with the Israelis kicking the hell out of the Soviet client states in the Middle East, and they were able to do basically nothing about it.

The legend is that there were MiGs getting blown up on the ground before they'd even finished getting unpacked from their shipping crates.

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Mercury delay line memory was competitive with early drums, but as soon as random-access storage became available (in the form of Williams tubes and then core memory) it went away pretty fast. See the classic story of "Mel, a Real Programmer". (GIYF)

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 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

What reward? What's Mars got that anyone wants?

The "Agriculture Department" tends to be a catch-all for any number of projects that have little and nothing to do with farming.

Just to go and back? That's too long by itself, much less staying there (for whatever reason one would want to).

If it were a turkey sandwich it wouldn't be useless, either.

To what benefit?

It's a good place for him.

SR51, perhaps?

TI calculators, bah! Garbage. ;-)