[cbd1984]

We've forgotten how hard of a problem RAM used to be, and how far into the Rube Goldberg we went to solve it.

Things We Actually Did:

Mercury delay lines were tubes full of mercury we sent vibrations through. Those vibrations would reflect around and get detected and read out later. This wasn't, technically, random-access, but it was memory.

Williams-Kilburn tubes were CRTs with long-persistence phosphor, the exact opposite of what display CRTs used, and metal plates on the front to allow the contents of memory to be read out. You could have two identical CRTs, one with the plate to use as RAM and one built into the display panel so the operators could see the contents of RAM in real time.

Core memory was tiny little ceramic ferrite doughnuts woven into complicated metal grids which would change how they were magnetized in response to a sufficient current; their state could be read back out non-destructively, and core was, in fact, nonvolatile. The core modules were woven by hand by women working with microscopes and very steady hands.

Being able to make usable amounts of memory out of components we can just etch into silicon was an amazing advance. Nothing short of revolutionary, really; computers as we know them would be flatly impossible without cheap, plentiful RAM.

[nickpsecurity]

There's a few of us here combing through the old stuff to see all that old wisdom and tricks. So many clever things. I saw the mercury computers researching old systems of my arch-nemesis, the NSA. The document joked that buffer overflows were a serious problem on those. No shit lol!

The rope memory I read about studying Apollo and Margaret Hamilton's work. Core I saw a bit of watching videos of Burroughs computers, my favorite, being assembled in factories. It was actually kind of mesmerizing watching that old stuff because you can see all the brilliance and intricacies of the device. Today, it's all hidden behind plastic for anyone except labs (eg ChipWorks) that can pull it out. People say, "Why would I pay (obscene amount here) dollars for this little piece of plastic?" One thing I do is show them pictures of old computers without covers saying "It's basically that... with 10x more components... squeezed into that tiny space. What, did you think squeezing a room full of wiring and components into a tiny space cost a few bucks?"