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For Sale: Soviet Military Ferrite Core Memory Stack Cube and Manual

ebay.com

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Re: For Sale: Soviet Military Ferrite Core Memory Stack Cube and Manual

#31

Post by UnfalseDesign »

techdragon wrote: post #11

Yeah I love the look of this, but a 2K buy it now price, not exactly letting people find its true value. (not getting into free market stuff, just saying these kind of "i think its worth $X thousand, buy it or not" stuff isn't exactly the point of eBay)

eBay has been slowly moving away from being an auction house (the internet's garage sale) for years now. They have been moving towards becoming the "storefront" for people selling things without needing an actual physical store. Hence the attention to "Buy It Now" and "Add to Cart" over "Bid".

Re: For Sale: Soviet Military Ferrite Core Memory Stack Cube and Manual

#32

Post by gvb »

nsxwolf wrote: post #10
hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #4

That's crazy, you can see it's handmade. I wonder if it still works?

Might be fun to hook it up to an Arduino and see if you could read/write. I imagine it needs its own power supply.

Core memory is non-volatile. If you hooked it up to a computer, you could read out what was written into it. Theoretically.

NASA recovered the Challenger's core memory out of the ocean and was able to read it out months after the disaster.

"On March 19, 1986, NASA announced that four of five Challenger General Purpose Computers (GPC) had been recovered from the Atlantic and moved to the IBM Federal Systems Division facility in Owego, NY. The GPCs were cleaned under controlled conditions and submerged in deionized water at Kennedy Space Center prior to air shipment March 16, 1986, to Owego. The GPC ferrite core memories were examined for any possible residual data -- a process that at the time was expected to take several months. This information was in the form of data--not onboard voice--and this path was pursued to add any possible additional information to the accident investigation. Many weeks later, it was found that the additional data frames did not measurably add to the information already gathered during the investigation."

Ref: http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/conspiracy/q0258a.shtml

Re: For Sale: Soviet Military Ferrite Core Memory Stack Cube and Manual

#33

Post by smackfu »

Nekorosu wrote: post #8

Absolutely overpriced.

I agree. Generally you can get completely obsolete very cool old hardware for not much of a premium on raw shipping cost. Yes, in theory, museums should want this stuff, but they don't. And it doesn't matter if the board cost $50k originally and is military-spec and uses crazy high-end components. Most sellers just want an alternative to throwing it out.

There's a guy on Youtube who buys stuff like this and takes it apart to see what weird stuff they did: http://www.youtube.com/user/mikeselectricstuff

Re: For Sale: Soviet Military Ferrite Core Memory Stack Cube and Manual

#34

Post by Jgrubb »

hamiltonkibbe wrote: post #29
JonnieCache wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an offshoot of the Mellotron[1] which was basically the original sampler. The mellotron was/is a keyboard where pressing each key spooled out and played back an individual tape strip of a real string section, cello, flute etc. It's the string sound that's really famous and recognisable. The mechanisms make a VHS look simple, see the wiki article for diagrams. The linked machine is a read-write version of the mel…

And the Strawberry Fields flute sound!

Also the strings in Spaceboy from Siamese Dream, for all you other 35 year olds out there...

Re: For Sale: Soviet Military Ferrite Core Memory Stack Cube and Manual

#35

Post by hcarvalhoalves »

gvb wrote: post #32
nsxwolf wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might be fun to hook it up to an Arduino and see if you could read/write. I imagine it needs its own power supply.

Core memory is non-volatile. If you hooked it up to a computer, you could read out what was written into it. Theoretically. NASA recovered the Challenger's core memory out of the ocean and was able to read it out months after the disaster. "On March 19, 1986, NASA announced that four of five Challenger General Purpose Computers (GPC) had been recovered from the Atlantic and moved to the IBM Federal Systems Division f…

I was going to respond that to the parent, but you beat me :)

Imagine hooking up and figuring out you can read it? Even better, imagine it contains nuke launch codes (in the best soviet-from-secret-agent-movie tradition)?!

Re: For Sale: Soviet Military Ferrite Core Memory Stack Cube and Manual

#36

Post by lifeformed »

techdragon wrote: post #11

Yeah I love the look of this, but a 2K buy it now price, not exactly letting people find its true value. (not getting into free market stuff, just saying these kind of "i think its worth $X thousand, buy it or not" stuff isn't exactly the point of eBay)

The $2k is just a price cap, you can still bid on it.

Re: For Sale: Soviet Military Ferrite Core Memory Stack Cube and Manual

#37

Post by jacquesm »

ajross wrote: post #21
colanderman wrote: post #5

That's 4K words ; each word seems to be 18 bits (assuming that's what "width" means). That's 9 kB by today's standards.

Typical usage was to pack 3 6-bit characters into a word on these machines if you weren't simply using it as integer data. So it's "really" something closer to 12k of text or (assuming all the computations fit in the different word sizes) 16k of integer/pointer data.

There is some chance the 9th bit in each half-word was for parity.

Re: For Sale: Soviet Military Ferrite Core Memory Stack Cube and Manual

#38

Post by neverm0re »

jacquesm wrote: post #18
JonnieCache wrote: post #3

Nothing next to this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/1967-vintage-London-MELLOTRON-Progra... My birthday is soon. Email in profile.

Wow, what a find. A tape based sampler. Amazing. That would be so much fun to restore to working condition.

You can build 'em out of essentially scrap parts fairly easily, actually. There's also dumps of the Melloton's sample reels floating around if you particularly want that sound rather than producing your own.

Peter Christopherson and Chris Carter of Throbbing Gristle made their own tape loop sampler out of car tape decks, some simple soldering and a keyboard controller in the late 70s. They could control the pitch, rewind, forward, etc. and otherwise trigger various tape loops which was the basis of the band's sound.

There's no reason to stop with tapes, though. MiniDisc is cheap, dead and has seamless shuffle (!!!) which means a whole stack of 'em could be chained to a mixer and played similarly. Still, you won't get the odd mechanical quirks and failings of using a cassette based system, especially if you start munging with manipulating playback speeds which may or may not be interesting to you.

Re: For Sale: Soviet Military Ferrite Core Memory Stack Cube and Manual

#39

Post by leddt »

noobs wrote: post #28
nsxwolf wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overpriced in terms of today's RAM prices (yes!), or overpriced for a Soviet 4K RAM module of its type? I've never seen one before so I have no idea.

Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory states that: "in 1980, the price of a 16-kW (kiloword, equivalent to 32kB) core memory board that fitted into a DEC Q-bus computer was around US $3,000." This one is a 4kW or 9kB from 1983, I'll let you do the math!

If you consider inflation and, more importantly, rarity, I think it's not that overpriced.

Re: For Sale: Soviet Military Ferrite Core Memory Stack Cube and Manual

#40

Post by jacquesm »

smackfu wrote: post #33
Nekorosu wrote: post #8

Absolutely overpriced.

I agree. Generally you can get completely obsolete very cool old hardware for not much of a premium on raw shipping cost. Yes, in theory, museums should want this stuff, but they don't. And it doesn't matter if the board cost $50k originally and is military-spec and uses crazy high-end components. Most sellers just want an alternative to throwing it out. There's a guy on Youtube who buys stuff like this and takes it…

I guarantee you that this assembly did not cost the local equivalent of $50 originally.
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