I remember an IBM engineer talking about this at our
ham radio club. The
wire was coiled inside a drum and pulses were sent
down the wire.? The
'read head' was? a magnetic pickup at the other end of the coil - and
access time was however long it took the pulse to
arrive at the other
end.? Therefore storage capacity was inversely proportional to data
quantity, however at that time I was working with 660kB Univac FH330
drums for swapping and the 2-ton Fastrand for 164kB of long-term
storage, so it has to be taken in context!
Although the read was actually non-destructive, the pulse had to be
regenerated to go around agaiun.
Is that maybe what you are thinking of?
cheers,
Nigel
On 20/10/2019 10:35, dwight via cctalk wrote:
I was just listening to a video on the Voyager
space craft. It used an interesting type of memory, called magnetic wire memory. There is
only a little bit of information of it on the web. It is clever in that has a
non-destructive read. I just wondered if any one else was familiar with this type of
memory.
Dwight
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Nigel Johnson
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