OT: 30th anniversary of the Challenger

In the link I posted to images of core memory, there is a small schematic of the wiring layout among the pictures.

Floppy disks killed bubble memory off. The drives became cheaper than bubbles (and about the same size) and, of course, had removable media, as a bonus.

Hey I never heard of it either.

George H.

We went to the moon 45 years ago and brought back some dirt. Most of the dirt samples have been lost or stolen; they aren't very interesting. No nation has bothered to put more people on the moon, or even to bring back any more dirt. Much less establish a colony on the moon.

Then why go at all?

It can't, and radiation would kill the crew. ISS needs continuous supplies to keep the crew alive.

But why? We have robot rovers on Mars, and it's only mildly interesting. If we want Mars dirt, we don't need people to collect it.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

I used u-shaped ferrite cores with removable tops; they were easier to thread and modify than toroids.

My rope memory (I just learned that term!) was a prototype. Fusible-link bipolar roms came out about that time, so we used them in production.

The product was a shipboard "bell logger". I designed my own CPU too, two boards full of TTL, with a 4-phase 20 KHz clock. That didn't last long either, as the 6800 uP came out the next year or so.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

A lot of people claim they saw it coming. What they actually said at the time was that the USSR would be around a long time and we had to learn to live with it. Only Reagan said it was doomed. Only him. Conservatives said his claims of their coming demise was great propaganda, and liberals said it was dangerous propaganda. Nobody else said it was true. Zbigniew Brzezinski said the division of Eastern Europe should not be considered permanent but didn't say it was to end very soon. Ten years later the USSR fell and liberals started claiming that they knew all along. One in particular that I remember was Lester Thurow, who was one of the most prominent liberal economists in the 80's and did commentary every week on the PBS business shows. In 1981 he said the USSR had "a lot of stability in reserve" and was going to last, and 10 years later on the same show said it was inevitable and was not expedited by Reagan's policies.

In 1982 Israel had a little fiasco in Lebanon, so they weren't batting

1000. But the Russians couldn't intervene without starting WW3. It didn't mean they were weak. Anyway almost nobody concluded from anything that happened in the middle east, or anywhere else, that they were about to fall.

They had more planes than pilots.

Nice attempt at a synopsis, idiot.

You are so full of shit so much of the time. The stench pervades.

You are not interesting at all, punk.

You're an idiot. It was an incredibly difficult feat, and even after all these years, the only country trying or thinking about trying is China. Get a clue.

And there is a vast amount of energy to be drawn from The Moon. And the term is capitalized when referring to OUR moon, idiot.

You are dumber than dirt.

It's called exploration. You acknowledge the value of doing it with probes. People can do more and on a national scale the cost of a few missions is reasonable.

If they offered any scientist a seat he would go, and so would anyone with scientific curiosity. You would go if offered a seat because you know you'd learn something.

And that would be worthwhile if they were in a vehicle that enabled them to learn something.

We could send only unmanned subs to explore oceans, but we send humans as far down as we can, and they do learn things a robot wouldn't.

Vacuum isn't very interesting. "Exploring space" is absurd.

I certainly wouldn't go.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

And IBM's TROS (transformer read-only storage) which was used for microcode on at least the IBM System 370/155 mainframe. This consisted of mylar sheets with (from memory) embedded circuit traces looping through squared-off separatable toroid loops: punch out one trace for a '1', a different one for a '0'.

It was useful because you could update the microcode simply by opening up a box, lifting out a stack of these mylar sheets, and replacing one with the updated version.

Not to be confused with CCROS, which used Hollerith-card-shaped mylar capacitor plate arrays that could be modified with an 026/029 card keypunch.

CCROS is only mentioned in passing on Wikipedia:

Ah, history!

Frank McKenney McKenney Associates

--
  My father ... drilled into me from an early age that if someone says 
  something is impossible, that just means it will take a bit longer 
  to achieve, and that the only failure in working with equipment is 
  if it fatally electrocutes you. 
                     -- Seth Horowitz / The Universal Sense

The HP9100 desktop programmable calculator used core to store the program. You could start a program running, power it down, and it would resume executing on powerup. I started a minor industry by simulating steamship power plants on a 9100.

The 9100 had three ROMs: one diode martix, one resistor matrix, and one multilayer PC board that used inter-layer magnetic coupling.

I have two dead 9100s that I'd likle to fix some day. HP never revealed the schematics. The HP archivist says she has them and no, I can't see them.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

I had a TI-82 graphing calculator in high school. Some nice person ported the game Breakout to the Z-80 BASIC interpreter used on that device and we'd play it during calculus class, when we were supposed to be learning integration by parts or some other thing nobody cared about.

It was okay, but ran a little slow.

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----Android NewsGroup Reader---- 
http://usenet.sinaapp.com/

Here's one such youtube video:

Checking the weaving work of the Apollo memory was a hell

The video speaks of "gentle weaving hands." It's my experience that American electronic assembly lines (back when America still had such things) consisted mostly of women. Someone along the way told me that women are better adapted for such work due to their smaller hands and fingers.

_Computers in Space_ says that the lettering on the PRO (proceed) key of the rather buggy Apollo computer got worn off through constant use because the software constantly paused for permission to proceed. Astronauts were busy flying so the tendancy was to just punch the PRO key without digesting the message. Astronauts were Windows users before their time, complacently clicking through incessant nagging OK/Cancel dialogs to continue. :)

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Don Kuenz KB7RPU

Sounds more like plated wire memory. (Sperry/Univac was big on that for military stuff). Magnetic but with non-destructive readout. Random access and high speed (sub-microsecond) (for that time).

All this non-semiconductor memory was insanely expensive by modern standards. A dollar a byte for commerical grade core memory. Gold plate the price for aerospace stuff. (And that's mid 1960's dollars, so multiply by 20 or so to compensate for inflation).

Mark Zenier snipped-for-privacy@eskimo.com Googleproofaddress(account:mzenier provider:eskimo domain:com)

}snip{

Huh, are you serious? Look in what direction the NATO did not expand after the Soviet collapse...

The U.S. is invading Grenada on the orders of the local bananagarchs if the laborers simply demand a fair wage. But I guess that's not 'expansion'. The U.S. put atomic weapons in Turkey, almost the front yard of the Soviet Union and then cried bloody murder when the Soviets shipped some of the same weapons to Cuba, almost causing a nuclear armageddon in the process. The U.S. causes a revolution, including polish NATO-trained Majdan-square snipers, just to take Crimea and the Ukraine away from the Russians who happen to have their strategically most important port there, and then shout bloody murderous 'expansion' when Russia secures its interests in a far more civilized way than the U.S. is used to do.

'expansionist Putin'? Sorry, but I call that hypocritical bullshit.

are bloody war criminals with their attempts to genocide the Palestinians away.

Right.

joe

At least the button didn't move so it was OK/Cancel and then Cancel/OK.

And it didn't change focus so a different button appeared under your finger as you were typing. Today I hit the space bar and gave the default answer to a dialog box that appeared while I was typing, and I have no idea what it was asking.

You're a goddamned idiot.

Were that the goal, they could easily have exectued such.

And there is no such thing as a "palestinian".

Get educated, dork. And just so you know, this video is the imam of the biggest mosque in the entire world.

The vacuum is between the bits you want to explore. "Exploring space" would be absurd, but in reality the explorers are traveling through empty space to get to regions where there's stuff worth exploring. In times past they s ailed over empty oceans to discover interesting new continents (and America ).

Nobody has ever accused you of having scientific curiosity, or any kind of connection to science. You do seem to be able to manage technology, provide d that it doesn't get too complicated - no designing your own transformers

- but your scientific knowledge is so minimal that you believer everything that you read about climate change on denialist web-sites.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

I guess that's your way of saying that you think I'm wrong.

True, and it would probably have had some consequences. But if they are 'only' robbing the Palestinians of their land, because that's what happening since the founding of the state Israel, then why the white phosphor, shelling and killing of Palestinians? Not to mention the arbitrary arrests, imprisonments and torture...

So who was living on all that land and in all those houses in Palestine before the Israeli state 'acquired' it? And where do all those people squeezed into Gaza come from?

Yes I've seen that video before, I guess you postedit here some time ago.

joe