slovenskoAt first (1946), Williams tubes (more accurately, Williams-Kilburn tubes) a storage system based on cathode ray tubes were used as memory, but these devices were always temperamental and unreliable. IBM 701 used such memory, for example. The Williams tube tended to become unreliable with age.
By contrast, mercury delay line memory was slower and also needed hand tuning, but it did not age as badly and enjoyed some success in early digital electronic computing despite its speed, weight, cost, and toxicity problems. On the picture in the left, taken in Deutsches museum Munich, you can see the memory from UNIVAC I.
Magnetic cores originated with two inventors: A. Wang and F. W. Viehe, who independently began experimenting with cores for computer memories in the 1940s. Later development work was done by others, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, RCA and IBM. In the 1950s and 1960s, cores were progressively miniaturized to produce high-speed memories. By the late 1950s, industrial plants had been set up in the Far East to build core. Inside, hundreds of low-paid workers strung cores for cents a day. This lowered the cost of core to the point where it became largely universal as main memory by the early 1960s, replacing both the low-cost/low-performance drum memory as well as the high-cost/high-performance systems using vacuum tubes as memory. The core memory is actually RAM – random access memory as well as today’s silicon memory chips.
Core was in turn replaced by silicon memory chips in the 1970s.
The exhibition includes:
