Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2013/12/15

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Subject: [Leica] Old computer story
From: kanner at acm.org (Herbert Kanner)
Date: Sun, 15 Dec 2013 13:30:22 -0800
References: <8D0C66F31B9C3F1-1DEC-9A58@webmail-va003.sysops.aol.com>

I?ve got to investigate just what Wang patented and when (core memory). I?m 
pretty sure that the most common core memory configuration: vertical and 
horizontal wires that by coincidence establish an address (the core plane 
carries one bit of of the value at that address) and a sensing wire that in 
a series of diagonal loops goes through every core in the plane. That 
organization was invented by Jay Forester for the Whirlwind computer at MIT 
and I think it preceded Wang?s invention. I?ll see what Wikipedia has to say 
on the subject, but I actually met a man who was on Foresters project at a 
time when the memory of Whirlwind was the unreliable Williams tubes, and he 
told me how he saw these magnetic cores used in a shift register on a relay 
computer at Harvard, went back to MIT and bugged Forester about ?why can?t 
we make an addressable computer memory using these cores.

Herbert Kanner
kanner at acm.org
650-326-8204

Question authority and the authorities will question you.




On Dec 13, 2013, at 3:07 PM, lrzeitlin at aol.com wrote:

> Interesting old computer story. In this day of smart phones it's hard to 
> believe that computers were once as big as houses. As a young college 
> student I used to walk by a building on campus that emitted sounds like a 
> threshing machine. One day I wandered in and found that it was the home of 
> the Aiken Mark 1 computer, a 30 foot long electro mechanical device that 
> was like a Frieden Calculating machine on steroids. The noise was the 
> sound of thousands of relays opening and closing. It took 3 seconds to add 
> a pair of numbers, about 16 seconds to divide them. Dr. Aiken started work 
> on it before WW2 and it continued in operation well into the Korean war 
> cranking out data for the military. I was shown around the lab by An Wang, 
> a graduate student, who later invented the core memory and founded Wang 
> computing. In fact the first computer I ever bought for myself was a Wang 
> 700 that required programming in assembly language, displayed the results 
> on Nixie tubes and stored programs on audio cassette cartridges. High tech 
> indeed.
> 
> Larry Z
> 
> 
> 
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Replies: Reply from richard at richardmanphoto.com (Richard Man) ([Leica] Old computer story)
In reply to: Message from lrzeitlin at aol.com (lrzeitlin at aol.com) ([Leica] Old computer story)