A Nibble Of Core Memory, In An SAO

Core memory, magnetized memory using tiny magnetic rings suspended on a grid of wires, is now more than five decades obsolete, yet it exerts a fascination for hardware hackers still. Not least [And…

Inside A Mystery Aerospace Computer With [Ken Shirriff]

When life hands you a mysterious bit of vintage avionics, your best bet to identifying it might just be to get it in front of the biggest bunch of hardware hounds on the planet. After doing a teard…

What’s A Transfluxor?

In the 1967 movie The Graduate, a wise older man gives some advice to the title character: plastics. Indeed, plastics would become big business. In 1962, though, a computer-savvy character might ha…

Saving Apollo By Decoding Core Rope

One of our favorite retro hardware enthusiasts, [CuriousMarc], is back with the outstanding tale of preserving Apollo Program software, and building a core rope reader from scratch to do it. We&#82…

GLASNOST Is A Computer That Makes Transparency A Priority

We live in a world where most of us take the transistor for granted. Within arm’s length of most people reading this, there are likely over ten billion of them sending electrons in every dire…

Supercon 2022: Andy Geppert Is Bringing Core Memory Back

Many Hackaday readers will be familiar with the term “core memory”, likely thanks to its close association with the Apollo Guidance Computer. But knowing that the technology existed at …

VCF East 2023: Andy Geppert Talks Core Memory

Do you know core memory? Our prehistoric predecessors would store data in the magnetic fields of ferrite rings, reading out the ones and zeroes by setting the magnetic field and detecting if a smal…

Soviet-Era Auto Dialler Uses Magnetic Rope Core Memory

We’ve seen a few interesting magnetic core memories on these fine pages over the years, but we don’t recall seeing too many user programmable magnetic core memory devices. This interest…

Taking A Walk Down [Computer] Memory Lane

There’s nothing quite like going to a museum and being given a tour by a docent who really knows their way around the exhibits. When that docent has first hand experience in the subject matter, the…