18 Feb
2008
18 Feb
'08
2:52 p.m.
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 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.
-tony