18 Feb
2008
18 Feb
'08
3:21 p.m.
Subject: Re: Bubble memory devices
From: ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell)
Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2008 22:52:51 +0000 (GMT)
To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
So the claimed. It was small, 128kb and largest was 512kb. It wasn't
energy frugal the 128k board was something like 12W! It had a fussy
startup and shutdown. and a 3.5" floppy at that time was new, expensive
but bigger(360k) and lower power. Never really made prime time.
I have two of them in a system that work well but speed is lower than
5.25 40track SD floppy and power is the same.
Allison
Anyway, on page 46 I stumbled across an
interesting article (called "A
Slow Road To Bubble Memories") about bubble memory. The main bubble
memory manufacturers of the time were Intel Corp., Texas Instruments
and Rockwell Int. The article also mentions that Rockwell had a bubble
system, a 256K bit board, available for $1,800. Meanwhile Intel had a
bubble system in kit form - 7110-1 Magnetic Memory board came with all
control and support circuitry - and sold for $2,000.
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 pretty 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.