these clones have been in the catalogues of electronic distributors in the late 70ies, early 80ies. *I am truely amazed* that the build quality of (at least some of) them looks rather acceptable!
My wife only tolerates me hoggin' the TV watching Dave's YT channel. However, this time she actually put her book down, sat up and took notice. How does it go: "That's a bobby dazzler!" Good show there, Mic.
Dave, The ferrite core memory was, to the best of my knowledge, constructed by hand. Women actually weaving the wires through the cores. We had a substitute instructor in college for a hardware class who had worked on developing these types of memories. One of the problems that he had was heat buildup because of the density. Running faster needed more voltage which caused more heat. Each plane of cores was one bit of a word, you'd run them in parallel to build whole words. the planes would be built s close as possible to save room. One experiment in cooling had the memories in a large tube and cooled mineral oil flowing over them to remove the heat. But it kept failing at the same place over and over. What they found was that the flowing oil was making certain beads spin and wear away the insulation from the wires causing a short. Solution was guide vanes in the tube to smooth out the oil flow. #talesfromthedarkages
27:20 You're referring to this Computer for Apollo I came across this a long time back. Extremely interesting stuff, and it's interesting to see how far we've come with computers and what-not
Absolutely loved seeing the microscope closeup of the core memory. They were probably 16 bit words, but may have been more. I'm sure someone will know. The Control Data Cyber mainframes had 60bit words, and the core memory in those was quite large -- extended core memory came along later, and the ferrite cores in ECM boards were truly microscopic.
Hope you can fix the DAB radio in a future vid, Dave. At 21:54 it looks like there is a 'puncture' in the flat flex, just below the '3' in the part number.
Dave, at 21:27, there's a little hole in the flatflex (top center) that might have broken one of the data (or other) lines. Maybe that's why the LCD doesn't work ? (if the soldering on the flatflex is ok)
At 21:27 I saw that hole as well as the jumper link patches don't look quite finished. There was two or three traces towards the middle right that still needed to be fixed. Can't wait to see if Dave can revive that thing.
OSHbots Oops, fixed timestamp. Yes after posting I've had another look at the flatflex and you can see the second link, starting from left seems to have ripped. Not sure about the two in the middle without a little wire to make a link.
pyroesp Looks to me like there's a tear running all the way through the first 12 or so traces from the right, and it's right along where the stiffener ends. I'll bet somebody got a little careless taking the thing apart, and either yanked it or slipped with a tool and hit it.
My grandfather worked on anti-balistic missiles back in the vacuum tube computer days. He told me that those old magnetic memory banks were hand wired, and the poor ladies who did it often didn't last more than about a month because it would drive them crazy!
That Chinese meter looks like having been made by a serious company or institution, not just cheap mass production. This was at a time when China was struggling hard to get up to date with technologies after decades of political isolation.
Love the ferrite core memory. Built a small 4-byte matrix once, couldn't figure out how to drive it. Hoping you make a video about writing/reading to it.
WHAT?!?!!? That must have taken FOREVER. That would be the ultimate test of patience for me. Bet that memory would still work a hundred years from now, they sure dont make things like they used to. May be faster, but the reliability isnt even close.
I used to use and repair Data General 16K magnetic core memory boards when I had a summer job in high school. That was about 1977 or so and RAM was out but the core boards were still in use in lots of machines. They had MUCH smaller magnetic cores than this one. Very convenient as you could load your test program in the board, then move it to another machine and run it! Didn't loose it's data on power down!
ahh 1970, I remember it well. Army Basic Training, Advanced training, a short visit home to make a baby with my new wife, and I was off to Vietnam. I recall my first computer, a Commodore 128, when I first got it, I had it in my head that when the computer read from the memory, it could be changed and the entire program had to be written back to the disk. Thankfully my son was there to straighten me out on that.
From the net: 1. In spite of considerable effort, no one successfully automated the production of core, which remained a manual task into the 1970s. 2. But manufacturing it was a delicate job, entrusted mostly to women using microscopes and steady hands to thread thin wires through holes about the diameter of a pencil lead.
Yes, I need to see hat done. I may even try some drops of ferrite laden glue over a grid and see if I can dump data to it, seeing how these aren't wound and simply passed through. Even making a single bit a a larger ferrite would be interesting to accomplish. I remember correctly, as long as they stay magnetized, the data is kept. So its semi non-volatile because it could stay for a little while. Imagine accidentally bringing a magnet near a running server's memory, THE HORRORS!!! LOL.
+theLuigiFan0007 No, it stayed magnetized until th next read operation - destructive read. What sit still the case in modern DRAM. Except this needs refresh, even without reading, after some ms.
goamarty Yeah I know it's destructive read. I meant it would stay until you did something else to it. I need to be more clear with my descriptions. XD However, I did not know that even modern DRAM was destructive read. Thanks for the info.
The compartment and connector on the back of the WiFi Radio is for docking an Apple iPod/iPhone etc. You can clearly see the Apple 30 pin connector. Its not for powering the device from a battery source like you guessed/assumed.
The ferrite memory is so awesome, Dave, thanks for showing it up close. So easy to picture how it actually works, unlike, say, the micro SD! Please do try to get it working to store a few words. That would be a fantastic video.
For the record, a word of memory is two bytes. In a little-endian machine (e.g. Intel x86) the bytes are read in backwards, in a big-endian machine the bytes are read in in order.
I used to work for Digital Equipment Corp in NYC in 1978 as a Sr Field Engeneer and had a few accounts that had some old equipment that still used that type of core memory but it was 8k-32k for each board I worked on LSI 11/23, PDP 11/34A PDP-11/40, 11/45 11/60 PDP11/70 & VAX 11/780 & VAX 11/750
Pause on ''About the Author'', I love what Barry's dad did with him and that truck, what a lucky lad. Life is all about luck. Hope you all have some soon.
So, out of curiosity, I sat down and did some counting of the rows and columns in that core memory and came up with the following: 64 columns - AKA a 64 bit computer! 100 rows: Each row in the grid stored one word of data 4 sets of grids = 400 words :D That works out to be 3.15 kilobytes of data in modern storage parlance, using 8-bit words as we do these days. And having said that, a 64 bit computer in 1970 was a rare thing indeed! While word-length wasn't standardized as it is today, even some of the most complex systems like the IBM System/360 only used 32-bit words. And hefty machines costing in the realm of $10,000,000 (In 1960's dollars), the so-called "supercomputers" like the CDC 6600, used a 60-bit words! What really blows the mind though is what has happened to data density in the last 40 years! On a chip die smaller than your pinkie-finger's nail, and about as thick, you can pack in 1,099,511,627,776 bits of information! (1.09 trillion bits or 128GB, the largest currently available MicroSD card on the market) In the same volume as that core memory module, you could probably store several hundred terabytes of data with modern flash memory!
Laugh all you like at ferrite core RAM. But when you turn off the power you don't lose the magnetisation. Turn it back on and continue where you left off. We're slowly getting back to that type of computer.
Works the same as a modern Hard Drive then, and a HDD would probably be faster for the same function. And don't forget Flash memory. Significantly faster, and also with no power requirement. There's also FRAM - Ferromagnetic RAM, sold and manufactured today, in microchip format. Poor density and speed, but they are very robust in terms of data retention.
Crocodile Dundee, Monty Python, Beautiful vintage technology... you're hitting ALL the buttons! I laughed out (really) loud at 23:43 (it's 5am on a monday morning). Great video, Dave.
I'm glad you used the tegano microscope. Such a nice microscope but you often seem to favor trying to zoom in with your camera instead. I guess it's a hassle to get the tegano setup and mix in the footage but it's much better!
The 'ram' board was amazing to see. If you have the space on the wall, you should do a timeline starting with that (or something even older), through things like a platter from an ancient HD, 5.25" and 3.5" floppies, CD DVD and then a micro SD.
Wow, what a gift! Those things were amazing (still are) and expensive. You could hook up a board of LEDs to show it reacts to the pulses. Afterwards frame it. Treasure that beauty.
Low light also...the light blue of your rubber cover is entering the camera that is under exposing the main subject....the former darker blue was better because we could see the object in a better way.
Those I.C.s will be the sense and X/Y drivers. The signal read back from the core is insanely tiny, so those IC's amplify the output of the cores to then drive that signal back to the larger memory logic. There will be a driver/amplifier for each column of memory, and they may be cleverly multiplexed depending on the design of your particular board. Also, no surprise in not finding much information about them. There were off the shelf sense amplifiers and drivers for core memory, but many manufactures rolled their own silicon for their core memory. Also, you can definitely bypass or isolate those chips and use a simple transistor driver circuit for a small number of cores. Probably be a bit of a fiddle figuring out the voltage and current levels required to sustain a stored bit without overdriving and smoking those insanely tiny wires. I've attached a link for a manual on a DEC PDP11 core memory that is pretty much all you need to know about driving core memory, and the voltage levels and such will probably be fairly close, so you can use the data and schematics in there to devise a discreet circuit to drive yours. bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dec/pdp11/memory/MM11-E_CoreMemoryManual.pdf
The core memory used in the Western Electric No 1 and No 1A ESS machines were much nicer. The memory was not destroyed on a read operation due to a bias wire ( the forth wire) in the core. We had line-up after line-up of frames containing similar core arrays used to store writable data such as network path information etc. Thanks for the video. I can smell the shellac.
those pure lcd screens are well known to be flaky, the sad part is both the flex and lcd are available as spare parts. fixed a few evokes and other pure radios. also that memory wafer is cool never seen one in real life, i have seen a converter board which basically plugs in the same but takes 1kb memory chips, i guess it was a way to increase the memory.
Build stuff! And I sincerely hope it fails on your first try, because that's when you learn the most, when stuff doesn't work and you have to troubleshoot it. Have fun!
Dave, if nobody else mentioned, that internet radio lcd patch cable has a hole under the " rti display " text ! one or two connections are severed there to ! Look at 21:40 minutes in your video. Like your crocodile dandy knife ! BTW i have an aunt and she lives in NSW somewhere :-))
Another amazing video! .. im curious about that LCD you can see where the flatflex bodge jumpers where some are broken ... seams easy to fix that up ... hopfully the other end of that flex is a ZIF but i doubt it it would be amazing to see if you can write and read data from that bit of memory! i have always been curious how these work! ... i understand how bead ROM works but not the RAM! oh and ps. count me in as the ones who love the new format!
Does anyone know if those memory modules were manufactured by hand or if there was any automation involved? You couldn't pay me enough to assemble one of them. Very cool piece though.
With that kind of setup, it does not look like magnetic core memory would be very fast (lots of overhead). Was it possible to overclock them and probably get a few MHz's of performance out of them :)?
I wouldn't think so. You need the pulses to be long enough to allow the ferrite rings to reach saturation. Ideally this might operate at 1Mhz, but you have to write back the data you read so the best you probably could hope for would be in the 500 kHz range. Trying to write faster than the cores can achieve saturation would likely end up giving you unusable data since the magnetic field strength of the rings would be too weak for the sense amplifier to register the difference in pulse phase to differentiate a 0 bit from a 1 bit. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory
That hunting knife ... wielded by an Aussie bloke ... Wolf Creek.... true story, right, of Mick Taylor? Or is that Dave Jones. The movie scene with the knife and the famous quote... Mick Taylor: What was it your mate said again? Oh, yeah, that's not a knife - *this* is a knife!
I stay far away from Swiss Army knifes. Had one really bad experience. It was dark and I was tired of all day treking. I needed to put up fire and got my Swiss Army knife from pocket to make some tinder. At some point I put it to ground and picket up. The blade was pointing towards me and I didn't see that. When I pushed blade to wood it snapped to close. Ok deep cut to hand, but when in reflex I pulled my hand it cut much deeper. After that I'm prefer locking blades of Leatherman...
Re the BRRI DVM, besides the Fluke you mention the presentation looks very much like a Kikusui 1506 from Japan ca. 1990 which I have here. I guess were both styled on the Flukes
That's a Nywfe! I have been waiting for years for that one to come up in your vlog Dave.
these clones have been in the catalogues of electronic distributors in the late 70ies, early 80ies.
*I am truely amazed* that the build quality of (at least some of) them looks rather acceptable!
My wife only tolerates me hoggin' the TV watching Dave's YT channel. However, this time she actually put her book down, sat up and took notice. How does it go: "That's a bobby dazzler!" Good show there, Mic.
Dave, The ferrite core memory was, to the best of my knowledge, constructed by hand. Women actually weaving the wires through the cores.
We had a substitute instructor in college for a hardware class who had worked on developing these types of memories. One of the problems that he had was heat buildup because of the density.
Running faster needed more voltage which caused more heat. Each plane of cores was one bit of a word, you'd run them in parallel to build whole words. the planes would be built s close as possible to save room.
One experiment in cooling had the memories in a large tube and cooled mineral oil flowing over them to remove the heat. But it kept failing at the same place over and over. What they found was that the flowing oil was making certain beads spin and wear away the insulation from the wires causing a short. Solution was guide vanes in the tube to smooth out the oil flow.
#talesfromthedarkages
27:20 You're referring to this Computer for Apollo
I came across this a long time back. Extremely interesting stuff, and it's interesting to see how far we've come with computers and what-not
I sitting at home, in the US summer, being sick, and hoping you posted a mailbag to brighten up my day.
You have have achieved that. Thank you, Dave.
Absolutely loved seeing the microscope closeup of the core memory. They were probably 16 bit words, but may have been more. I'm sure someone will know. The Control Data Cyber mainframes had 60bit words, and the core memory in those was quite large -- extended core memory came along later, and the ferrite cores in ECM boards were truly microscopic.
That knife had me in stitches.
That memory board looks really cool. I've never seen something like that before.
omg after a bazillion of mailbag vids I finally found the one introducing the standard everyday use australian knife. yay.
Hope you can fix the DAB radio in a future vid, Dave. At 21:54 it looks like there is a 'puncture' in the flat flex, just below the '3' in the part number.
The knife show staring Dave.
Dave, at 21:27, there's a little hole in the flatflex (top center) that might have broken one of the data (or other) lines.
Maybe that's why the LCD doesn't work ? (if the soldering on the flatflex is ok)
At 21:27 I saw that hole as well as the jumper link patches don't look quite finished. There was two or three traces towards the middle right that still needed to be fixed.
Can't wait to see if Dave can revive that thing.
OSHbots Oops, fixed timestamp. Yes after posting I've had another look at the flatflex and you can see the second link, starting from left seems to have ripped. Not sure about the two in the middle without a little wire to make a link.
pyroesp Looks to me like there's a tear running all the way through the first 12 or so traces from the right, and it's right along where the stiffener ends. I'll bet somebody got a little careless taking the thing apart, and either yanked it or slipped with a tool and hit it.
Gotta love the Crocodile Dundee quote! :D
My grandfather worked on anti-balistic missiles back in the vacuum tube computer days. He told me that those old magnetic memory banks were hand wired, and the poor ladies who did it often didn't last more than about a month because it would drive them crazy!
That Chinese meter looks like having been made by a serious company or institution, not just cheap mass production. This was at a time when China was struggling hard to get up to date with technologies after decades of political isolation.
It looked very well made compared to a modern Chinese meter.
Love the ferrite core memory. Built a small 4-byte matrix once, couldn't figure out how to drive it. Hoping you make a video about writing/reading to it.
Those magnetic core memories were actually woven by hand, thanks to a team of women with steady hands and lots of patience.
WHAT?!?!!? That must have taken FOREVER. That would be the ultimate test of patience for me. Bet that memory would still work a hundred years from now, they sure dont make things like they used to. May be faster, but the reliability isnt even close.
I used to use and repair Data General 16K magnetic core memory boards when I had a summer job in high school. That was about 1977 or so and RAM was out but the core boards were still in use in lots of machines. They had MUCH smaller magnetic cores than this one. Very convenient as you could load your test program in the board, then move it to another machine and run it! Didn't loose it's data on power down!
ahh 1970, I remember it well. Army Basic Training, Advanced training, a short visit home to make a baby with my new wife, and I was off to Vietnam. I recall my first computer, a Commodore 128, when I first got it, I had it in my head that when the computer read from the memory, it could be changed and the entire program had to be written back to the disk. Thankfully my son was there to straighten me out on that.
From the net:
1. In spite of considerable effort, no one successfully automated the production of core, which remained a manual task into the 1970s.
2. But manufacturing it was a delicate job, entrusted mostly to women using microscopes and steady hands to thread thin wires through holes about the diameter of a pencil lead.
That memory board was phenomenal. Please do write some data to it.
Yes, I need to see hat done.
I may even try some drops of ferrite laden glue over a grid and see if I can dump data to it, seeing how these aren't wound and simply passed through. Even making a single bit a a larger ferrite would be interesting to accomplish.
I remember correctly, as long as they stay magnetized, the data is kept. So its semi non-volatile because it could stay for a little while. Imagine accidentally bringing a magnet near a running server's memory, THE HORRORS!!! LOL.
I'd rather see what has been stored to that memory. It had to be very expensive at it's time. Would love to know what it has been used for.
+theLuigiFan0007 No, it stayed magnetized until th next read operation - destructive read. What sit still the case in modern DRAM. Except this needs refresh, even without reading, after some ms.
goamarty
Yeah I know it's destructive read. I meant it would stay until you did something else to it. I need to be more clear with my descriptions. XD
However, I did not know that even modern DRAM was destructive read. Thanks for the info.
The compartment and connector on the back of the WiFi Radio is for docking an Apple iPod/iPhone etc. You can clearly see the Apple 30 pin connector. Its not for powering the device from a battery source like you guessed/assumed.
loving the knife dave. nice bit of overkill
The ferrite memory is so awesome, Dave, thanks for showing it up close. So easy to picture how it actually works, unlike, say, the micro SD! Please do try to get it working to store a few words. That would be a fantastic video.
Well done to Stephan for the ferrite memory find! Very cool!
The deadpan way in which you opened the package with the knife had me in stitches. Hahaha.
For the record, a word of memory is two bytes. In a little-endian machine (e.g. Intel x86) the bytes are read in backwards, in a big-endian machine the bytes are read in in order.
Magnetic core memory! Awesome! It's hilarious that 40 years later, RAM still works on the rows/columns concept.
Love the new knife!!!
I used to work for Digital Equipment Corp in NYC in 1978 as a Sr Field Engeneer and had a few accounts that had some old equipment that still used that type of core memory but it was 8k-32k for each board I worked on LSI 11/23, PDP 11/34A PDP-11/40, 11/45 11/60 PDP11/70 & VAX 11/780 & VAX 11/750
Starting at 7:48 you can see how one type of core memory was made in the 1970's Manufacturing 1A and 2B ESS Memory - AT&T Archives
Pause on ''About the Author'', I love what Barry's dad did with him and that truck, what a lucky lad. Life is all about luck. Hope you all have some soon.
So, out of curiosity, I sat down and did some counting of the rows and columns in that core memory and came up with the following:
64 columns - AKA a 64 bit computer!
100 rows: Each row in the grid stored one word of data
4 sets of grids = 400 words :D
That works out to be 3.15 kilobytes of data in modern storage parlance, using 8-bit words as we do these days.
And having said that, a 64 bit computer in 1970 was a rare thing indeed! While word-length wasn't standardized as it is today, even some of the most complex systems like the IBM System/360 only used 32-bit words. And hefty machines costing in the realm of $10,000,000 (In 1960's dollars), the so-called "supercomputers" like the CDC 6600, used a 60-bit words!
What really blows the mind though is what has happened to data density in the last 40 years! On a chip die smaller than your pinkie-finger's nail, and about as thick, you can pack in 1,099,511,627,776 bits of information! (1.09 trillion bits or 128GB, the largest currently available MicroSD card on the market)
In the same volume as that core memory module, you could probably store several hundred terabytes of data with modern flash memory!
Laugh all you like at ferrite core RAM. But when you turn off the power you don't lose the magnetisation. Turn it back on and continue where you left off. We're slowly getting back to that type of computer.
Works the same as a modern Hard Drive then, and a HDD would probably be faster for the same function.
And don't forget Flash memory. Significantly faster, and also with no power requirement. There's also FRAM - Ferromagnetic RAM, sold and manufactured today, in microchip format. Poor density and speed, but they are very robust in terms of data retention.
Crocodile Dundee, Monty Python, Beautiful vintage technology... you're hitting ALL the buttons! I laughed out (really) loud at 23:43 (it's 5am on a monday morning). Great video, Dave.
I'm glad you used the tegano microscope. Such a nice microscope but you often seem to favor trying to zoom in with your camera instead. I guess it's a hassle to get the tegano setup and mix in the footage but it's much better!
Going all Dundee on that mail are we?
Love the knife! Perfect size too!
Dave, I think a standard "Hello World" would be apt for that memory!
I absolutely agree! Well Dave, we're waiting...
The 'ram' board was amazing to see. If you have the space on the wall, you should do a timeline starting with that (or something even older), through things like a platter from an ancient HD, 5.25" and 3.5" floppies, CD DVD and then a micro SD.
Wow, what a gift!
Those things were amazing (still are) and expensive.
You could hook up a board of LEDs to show it reacts to the pulses. Afterwards frame it. Treasure that beauty.
May I suggest an eight bit art " Thumbs up" for the memory test.
Sunday night mailbag is the best! Keep it up!
what a fantastic piece of functional art. would love to see it fired up
thx 4 sharing this 1
oh man that memory board looks awesome. i would love to see data written to that
Saturday -Sunday - Blermsday , who cares as long as I get a mailbag vid
Thank you Dave
The multi-metre was a real flash back, I'd forgotten about those old Flukes, they were standard issue back in the day.
Low light also...the light blue of your rubber cover is entering the camera that is under exposing the main subject....the former darker blue was better because we could see the object in a better way.
I would love to see more on the core memory, that looked really cool.
"Crocodile" Dundee knife ! :) Nice one !
TL062 is an Operational Amplifier...low noise unit.... with Jfet input
thumbs up for that bowie knife!
Those I.C.s will be the sense and X/Y drivers. The signal read back from the core is insanely tiny, so those IC's amplify the output of the cores to then drive that signal back to the larger memory logic. There will be a driver/amplifier for each column of memory, and they may be cleverly multiplexed depending on the design of your particular board. Also, no surprise in not finding much information about them. There were off the shelf sense amplifiers and drivers for core memory, but many manufactures rolled their own silicon for their core memory. Also, you can definitely bypass or isolate those chips and use a simple transistor driver circuit for a small number of cores. Probably be a bit of a fiddle figuring out the voltage and current levels required to sustain a stored bit without overdriving and smoking those insanely tiny wires.
I've attached a link for a manual on a DEC PDP11 core memory that is pretty much all you need to know about driving core memory, and the voltage levels and such will probably be fairly close, so you can use the data and schematics in there to devise a discreet circuit to drive yours.
bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dec/pdp11/memory/MM11-E_CoreMemoryManual.pdf
The core memory used in the Western Electric No 1 and No 1A ESS machines were much nicer. The memory was not destroyed on a read operation due to a bias wire ( the forth wire) in the core. We had line-up after line-up of frames containing similar core arrays used to store writable data such as network path information etc.
Thanks for the video. I can smell the shellac.
Clapped my hands and smiled with glee when i saw the big knife coming, god you are just an amazing man hahahaha
Its only 01:40 here in the United Kingdom on a Monday hehhe perfect time for EEVblog
Jesus, I actually laughed out loud when you pulled out the enormous knife. There is no way you should ever go back to your little one. Brilliant.
in Apollo video girls usually create ROM , where processor code is stored, not RAM.
down under knives?
1:59 LOL you totally remind me of photonic induction!
Photon has a porno voice, though
*****
Hahahhahaha OMG Im laughing so hard.
Power Max If Photon did a mailbag Monday, there'd be nothing left but a smouldering pile of garbage.
michael mclaughlin
LOL I would totally believe that. Would make for an interesting video though. He would completely obliterate everything haha.
michael mclaughlin I wish he'd do one still!
I love that Aussie knife. Reminds me of Crocodile Dundee !!!
Greetings from Switzerland !!
OH! They used that Ferrite core memory on the Saturn V Rocket! Fascinating how it works.
That is a proper Australian knife. Good for skinning crocs or opening mail.
@24:46 I was half expecting 'Its that.... Anthrax again'😂
those pure lcd screens are well known to be flaky, the sad part is both the flex and lcd are available as spare parts.
fixed a few evokes and other pure radios.
also that memory wafer is cool never seen one in real life, i have seen a converter board which basically plugs in the same but takes 1kb memory chips, i guess it was a way to increase the memory.
The knife on the book is a Victorynox, because it has the typical can opener. Wenger has another type :-)
looking on the Memory card, that green connector slot is very similar to the card from the saturn 5 rocket you have
For the core memory card. Remember that you have X and Y and sense lines. A read is a destructive read, so you need to do a "write back'
Word size is specified by the processor architecture. Typically 16 32 or 64 bits, but back then, I don't know what the word size could be.
Hi Dave I'm 12, and I'm getting into electronic. Do you have any suggestions for me
Build stuff! And I sincerely hope it fails on your first try, because that's when you learn the most, when stuff doesn't work and you have to troubleshoot it. Have fun!
And don't forget to take stuff apart :D
Build a simple amplifier. That was my first project.
Don't get electrocuted.
Pick up and Arduino, and good luck!
Dave, if nobody else mentioned, that internet radio lcd patch cable has a hole under the " rti display " text ! one or two connections are severed there to ! Look at 21:40 minutes in your video. Like your crocodile dandy knife ! BTW i have an aunt and she lives in NSW somewhere :-))
Hi Dave! Any particular reason the scope on the top shelf over your left shoulder is upside-down?
I have seen videos of an "asembely line" where ladys was siitting and putting ferrit memory together BY HAND!!
Dave, the only truly fair thing to store and retrieve from the ferrite memory would be a Space Invader, with that much ram, maybe even four off them.
Its almost 4 AM here at Latvia !
The issue with that DAB radio could be the hole in the cable, its about 2cm above the "repair"
Great knife! But is it the right for the job?
Dave, Have You ever seen a Kangaroo in real life ?
Of course he would have, they're everywhere!
azmanabdula I wanna be sure :D
use the force fair enough....
Note to others, When in Australia, dont pat kangaroos, they will kick the living hell out of you : P
azmanabdula iv'e heard that, they have fucking huge biceps lol
My old high school (Left in 2010) still uses those style DMMs...
LOL! When you pulled out the big knife it reminded me of Crocodile Dundee!
Ah Franky, thought he sounded familiar. His silicone test leads are pretty decent for the money leads to chuck in your toolbox
1:55 finally you're showing your Australian roots
HI Dave! Awesome mail! Thanks
I lost it when you started opening the first package with that ridiculous knife aha
the DMM is just digital chop sticks..they used the electrical resistance to calculate their caloric intake XD
Another amazing video! .. im curious about that LCD you can see where the flatflex bodge jumpers where some are broken ... seams easy to fix that up ... hopfully the other end of that flex is a ZIF but i doubt it
it would be amazing to see if you can write and read data from that bit of memory! i have always been curious how these work! ... i understand how bead ROM works but not the RAM!
oh and ps. count me in as the ones who love the new format!
Old times they used that paint over the trimmers to avoid drift due to vibrations
300,000,000 cool points for the knife!
And that big one ain't too bad either...
Dave AKA indiana Jones
try this video in the1970 vintage Magnetic Core Memory > World's First RAM Chip
Ha, I'm going to SDSU for EE. Circuit analysis 430 in the fall!
Does anyone know if those memory modules were manufactured by hand or if there was any automation involved? You couldn't pay me enough to assemble one of them. Very cool piece though.
With that kind of setup, it does not look like magnetic core memory would be very fast (lots of overhead). Was it possible to overclock them and probably get a few MHz's of performance out of them :)?
I wouldn't think so. You need the pulses to be long enough to allow the ferrite rings to reach saturation. Ideally this might operate at 1Mhz, but you have to write back the data you read so the best you probably could hope for would be in the 500 kHz range. Trying to write faster than the cores can achieve saturation would likely end up giving you unusable data since the magnetic field strength of the rings would be too weak for the sense amplifier to register the difference in pulse phase to differentiate a 0 bit from a 1 bit.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory
I would guess they likely would have run them as fast as they could reliably push the properties of the ferrite used.
Yep, use ferrites with arduino or attiny as a external memory! beauty)
That hunting knife ... wielded by an Aussie bloke ... Wolf Creek.... true story, right, of Mick Taylor? Or is that Dave Jones. The movie scene with the knife and the famous quote...
Mick Taylor: What was it your mate said again? Oh, yeah, that's not a knife - *this* is a knife!
A Word is usually two bytes (16-bit).
at the flex cabel.. you see its a hole right under the second 3 at the serial number..
I stay far away from Swiss Army knifes. Had one really bad experience.
It was dark and I was tired of all day treking. I needed to put up fire and got my Swiss Army knife from pocket to make some tinder. At some point I put it to ground and picket up. The blade was pointing towards me and I didn't see that. When I pushed blade to wood it snapped to close. Ok deep cut to hand, but when in reflex I pulled my hand it cut much deeper. After that I'm prefer locking blades of Leatherman...
Had the same experience with a different brand of knife. Still have the scar on my finger. I was eight years old at the time. Lesson learned.
The flex wire going to the LCD in the radio has a hole in it. Maybe, that's the problem
Hello!
Could you make seperate video about those in built transistor testers and do tests on them? :)
Re the BRRI DVM, besides the Fluke you mention the presentation looks very much like a Kikusui 1506 from Japan ca. 1990 which I have here. I guess were both styled on the Flukes
Monday, 00:00 here. Nice timing Dave!