Hand-wired core for ROM?

Paul Koning paulkoning at comcast.net
Fri Apr 10 09:46:15 CDT 2015


> On Apr 10, 2015, at 10:38 AM, geneb <geneb at deltasoft.com> wrote:
> 
> Did the PDP14 (or any machine of that era) ever use hand-threaded (by the end user) core boards as ROM?

Do you mean DEC machine?

I don’t know any.  Certainly not any PDP-11; those used solid state ROMs, or in the early boot ROM cards, diode arrays.

I think some IBM 360 models used core ROM for microcode.

Another early machine — the CDC 6000 series mainframes — used a switch matrix for the boot ROM (“deadstart panel”).  And the character shape data for the console display was originally implemented as a large pile of random logic, though in the 170 series it turned into a conventional ROM.

	paul




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