plated wire memory

[Nigel Johnson]

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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