Photo – and Video – of Magnetic Ferrite Core Memory | #retrocomputing

Flickr user ultrapurple uploaded the image above that’s a remarkable close-up of a piece of ferrite core memory – the wiring on these things is nearly impossible to comprehend by today’s standards, especially considering the limited amount of memory provided!

Seen at the UK National Physical Laboratory Open Day, May 2018

This is a small section of hand-made magnetic core memory, used on very early computers. The rings are made of ferrite (a material with magnetic properties) and each store one single ‘bit’ of information. You’d need about 7 per character, so what we see in the photo is way short of what you’d need to hold a tweet.

Now the photo ultrapurple took is of a piece of core memory that couldn’t hold a tweet…but this video from EEVblog shows a 400 character memory bank that could store a tweet!

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