Magnetic Core Memory From Soviet Russia

A piece of magnetic core memory that was used in a mainframe computer in the Soviet Union. It can store 4096 bits of data. This piece of memory supposedly came from a 'Saratov 2' which was a clone of the western PDP8 computer.

[Bassotronics]

It's amazing that something like this can even act like memory in the first place.

[LedoCool]

Babushka, please knit me a 16gb memory stick!

[XiaoP]

"Memory weaver" was a real job description at that time. The school where my uncle worked in 1980s in Slowakia had one of these Soviet computers. When the memory had a defect, female memory weavers from the Soviet Union came to repair the memory. Unbelievable.

[robinrai]

it's genuinely insane that computers exist when you even start to think about it

[markburgess]

The people that developed this sort of stuff are absolutely genius.

[TauvicRitter]

I once was an intern. The company used this principle to make failsafe digital controllers for industrial purposes. Even after power failure it will remember its settings after powerup. It was considered old fashioned but very reliable

[dannya]

Just a daily reminder that computing is performed through wizardry

[rusle]

This reminds me of a conversation I had with my father many years ago.
I was mentioning that the price of RAM was getting cheap and he smiled and answered me with that he remember when he had the conversation with colleagues that the RAM was getting cheap when the price had gone down to about 10 cent per bit.

[mediocreclementine]

The tie between early computing and weaving arts like lace making, crochet, and knitting, will never cease to amaze me.

[eg]

Absolutely wild how ancient materials can hold data that you can't even see with the bare eye.

[schwartz]

Must have been a nightmare to assemble

[thrandompug]

Imagine how well you have to understand this stuff to be able to create these

[qdaniele]

They were still used well past their golden age in the 50s/60s and into the 80s and even early 90s for some military and aerospace applications because they are way more resistant to radiation and EMPs than electric charge based memories like DRAM, SRAM or Flash while also being solid-state and pretty fast (unlike spinning HDDs).

[HobbyHalloween]

Very Cool... the one detail about reading core memory is that you destroy the data in the process, and you have to write it back. The Apollo rope memory is a similar technology, but it was READ-ONLY, so the bits for the code was hand woven, it blows my mind to think that's how this stuff worked in the day... I have a lot of respect to the ingenuity of those engineers and workers.

[The_Second_greatest_ever]

I love seeing old computer parts like this. Where you can actually see the bits with the naked eye. And it’s crazy how fast we went from this type of technology to chips the size of coins with billions of transistors on them

[lstray]

This tech not only soviet it was used globally. German inventor, even IBM bought the patent too. Cubes were built from these sheets. In HU they built these RAMs at Videoton, Székesfehérvár mainly by women (some of them came from textile industry) using microscopes, knittig rings with 0.1 mm diameter.

[ThinkForYourself]

That's so cool. It's a point in technology where things are still handmade but go into the most complicated technology of its time.

[Martin]

Wow that sounds super expensive considering the inflation of money over time.

[ilichyov_kolyan]

The main fun of this type of memory is that it allowed you to "record" not only 1 and 0, but also -1 by applying a negative voltage and magnetizing the cell in the opposite direction. Therefore, this memory provided a logical opportunity for the appearance of a computer with a ternary symmetric logic "Setun".

[Tommidgely]

In the mid 70s my school bought a secondhand DEC PDP 8 with this type of magnetic core memory. Also 4K. Used a type of telex machine to type in input and print out every output. Could also input one instruction at a time using lever switches on the main box. Ran Focal which was a stripped down Fortran. We learned simple programming and did simple maths and games. I saw the future sort of but had no idea where it would lead. Soon after the first so called integrated circuit came on the market. 8 transistors in one small piece. It was a big deal.