18 Feb
2008
18 Feb
'08
9:17 p.m.
I have an Intel SBX module that is installed in an Intel PDS. I was
always fond of the bubble memoery offered for the Apple ][ but never found
one.
George
=========================================================
George L. Rachor Jr. george at rachors.com
Hillsboro, Oregon http://rachors.com
United States of America Amateur Radio : KD7DCX
On Tue, 19 Feb 2008, Dave McGuire wrote:
On Feb 18, 2008, at 5:52 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
I've always been a fan of bubble memory, although I have no functional
bubble subsystems here. I've seen S-100 and Q-bus bubble memory boards (the
latter I missed on eBay by a few dollars maybe a year ago), and there's at
least one piece of test equipment made by Fluke (I don't recall which one)
that uses bubble memory cartridges. I also have some brand new Sharp CE-100B
cartridges, but no machine to use them in.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
What
happened to bubble memory? Did it die out due to the costs, or
did people prefer to use cassettes, disks etc. instead?
I think it p[retty much died out due to cost and limited capacity. IIRC,
that Intel chipset was 1Mbit, or 128K bytes. And it was hardly cheap.
Bubble memory did get used in some portables, for example, since with no
moving parts it's pretty rugged.
HP sold a bubble memory board for the HP9000/200 machines. It's pretty
much the Intel chipset along with the standard HP DIO slot interface
(address decoder, card ID regiter). It's used a 128K mass storage 'disk'
by the HP9000. There's some information, including a photo of the board,
over on http://www.hpmuseum.net.