18 Feb
2008
18 Feb
'08
9:13 p.m.
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.