New SSD Hard Drives

My HP laptop came with a 256 G SSD hard drive, so I was checking on upgrading to 4 or 500 gig drives and was amazed that the drive in this newer laptop takes a miniature type of drive, first I ever saw one. Kinda hard to imagine they can get so much info on a very small strip compared to the SATA drives. I have no use for a larger drive than 500 gig, even found a 2 TB SSD! Modern technology is quite mind boggling at times.
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The NORAD SAGE Computer system I used to maintain had what was called "ferrite core" memory. Basically a huge array of tiny magnetic doughnuts that can be magnetized in 2 different directions to represent a binary 1 or 0. Here is a picture is a small section of the memory from the actual computer I once worked on. This small piece (about 6 inches square) would represent ONE bit in a 32-bit computer word. Each core represents a different memory address. This sheet would be about 4096 addresses (think of that as "storage capacity" of about 4k). The second picture is of one of the core memories. There were two core memory units, one (called "Little Memory") was 10k storage (used for storing the program code for the operating system). This would have been comparable to today's "BIOS" in PCs. Another "Big memory" was used to accomplish all the computations, store and manipulate data, etc. I think the picture I have is of the "Little Memory" There are 32 (33 with parity) sheets of memory cores stacked one on top of the other - each sheet" representing a bit in the computer word.

Back in those days, I never could have imagined that one day I could carry around Terabytes of data on a stick the size of a pack of gum!

Or, as the manuals would tell us then, "hand-wound torroidal coils". One loop per side, one for "0", one for "1".

My Mk3Mod6 had a 4K stack. Not megs, not gigs...k.

That was RAM.....drum was hard.

Imagine 2 TB on this little hard drive! I wouldn't want to pay what it sells for.

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500GB: About 3.75" x 1.8" x .25" (And I imagine there's a lot of air inside the case - the actual memory chips much smaller). (They are available up to 2TB, but this one is only 500GB)

The amazing (to me) thing about core memory: Although it is "RAM", it doesn't go away when the power is off. You can even move a card from one machine to the other, and the memory contents are still there! The HP minicomputers I used to program "back when" kept the boot loader in core memory, just like the main program. If it did get damaged, you had to re-enter it through the front panel.

I used to have a 4K word core module with one of my programs in it, hanging on my office wall, but it got misplaced somehow.

Looking back, it's astounding how much we did with such tiny memory. Today, it takes hundreds of megabytes just to print "Hello World", but we used to squeeze an entire navigation system, including external inputs, into 16Kb.

I still have computers that came with top-of-the-line 256K RAM.

TOC said:

I still have computers that came with top-of-the-line 256K RAM.

Click to expand...

The "big" memory in the NORAD computer I mentioned above, was 256k - and that's what was running our Air Defense system for the nation!

Moore's Law. So far it's been proven correct.