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

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

#71

Post by Arnor »

derekp7 wrote: post #65
Arnor wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I obsess over these pedantic differences too and I'm repeatedly pitches 3.5" floppies onto your lawn NERD SHAME EDIT: It's been a while... 3.5"

What must really drive you nuts about your 3.5" floppies are the fact that they are not 1.44 MB, or 1.44 MiB, or anything else that resembles 1.44 x some factor. They are actualy 1000 x 1024 x 1440 bytes (so 1440 KiB). The 1.44 on them is derived from a mixture of SI and Binary units.

I was fortunate enough to stop using them long before it bothered me, but now it does!

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

#72

Post by sgt »

I would love to buy this and interface to it via the GPIO pins of the Raspberry Pi.

Perhaps the Pi could even piggyback onto the stack cube itself, and you could house it inside some kind of a glass container with inputs and output ports accessible from the outside.

It'd certainly be a conversation starter, and let's face it, who doesn't love core memory?

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

#73

Post by alex_hitchins »

jrabone wrote: post #48
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.

Interesting that the power plate indicates 60 Hz supply - yet the UK is 50 Hz. Perhaps stretching things for the title to claim it's "from" the BBC, as opposed to "as used by" - this one was most likely was made for the US market. I wonder what its provenance was?

Could it be to filter out the 50Hz mains interference?

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

#75

Post by cpr »

Brings back memories.

I remember IBM 360 "large core storage" devices at the Naval Electronics Lab on Point Loma (San Diego, where I worked as a high school student)--boxes that held a MEGABYTE of core (I think several milliseconds per byte access, so more like a fast DASD), which cost a MILLION dollars. ($1/byte)

We systems programmers thought we were in hog heaven, since most 360 mainframes of the day (1971) had 32KB or 64KB main memories. (Yes, KB.)

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

#76

Post by ajross »

jacquesm wrote: post #37
ajross wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh sure, "real" English text processing only ever worked with EBCDIC and ASCII (and obviously everyone else in the world had to wait for yet another bit to be added). But an awful lot of work was done with all the caps-only sixbit encodings (like BCDIC -- without the E), including source code and documentation that we all would view as classic "text" tasks these days.

The only real point was that early computers were packing an awful lot of useful information into some really tiny quarters. Just four of these cores would have provided an environment very similar in space to a C64.

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

#78

Post by jlgreco »

skore wrote: post #70
mhb wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As well as the audiophile-pleasing sound on those planes.

You can't really "measure" or double-blind test how well this thing kills people. Only if you have well developed taste can you appreciate the finer details, the warmth, the clarity, the fidelity.

> Only if you have well developed taste can you appreciate the finer details, the warmth, the clarity, the fidelity.

There are reports of ground crews for MiG-25's drinking the hydraulic fluid for the planes, which was apparently based on ethanol. Truly an aircraft for those with a discerning palette.

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