Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2013/12/15
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]I?ve got to investigate just what Wang patented and when (core memory). I?m pretty sure that the most common core memory configuration: vertical and horizontal wires that by coincidence establish an address (the core plane carries one bit of of the value at that address) and a sensing wire that in a series of diagonal loops goes through every core in the plane. That organization was invented by Jay Forester for the Whirlwind computer at MIT and I think it preceded Wang?s invention. I?ll see what Wikipedia has to say on the subject, but I actually met a man who was on Foresters project at a time when the memory of Whirlwind was the unreliable Williams tubes, and he told me how he saw these magnetic cores used in a shift register on a relay computer at Harvard, went back to MIT and bugged Forester about ?why can?t we make an addressable computer memory using these cores. Herbert Kanner kanner at acm.org 650-326-8204 Question authority and the authorities will question you. On Dec 13, 2013, at 3:07 PM, lrzeitlin at aol.com wrote: > Interesting old computer story. In this day of smart phones it's hard to > believe that computers were once as big as houses. As a young college > student I used to walk by a building on campus that emitted sounds like a > threshing machine. One day I wandered in and found that it was the home of > the Aiken Mark 1 computer, a 30 foot long electro mechanical device that > was like a Frieden Calculating machine on steroids. The noise was the > sound of thousands of relays opening and closing. It took 3 seconds to add > a pair of numbers, about 16 seconds to divide them. Dr. Aiken started work > on it before WW2 and it continued in operation well into the Korean war > cranking out data for the military. I was shown around the lab by An Wang, > a graduate student, who later invented the core memory and founded Wang > computing. In fact the first computer I ever bought for myself was a Wang > 700 that required programming in assembly language, displayed the results > on Nixie tubes and stored programs on audio cassette cartridges. High tech > indeed. > > Larry Z > > > > _______________________________________________ > Leica Users Group. > See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information