9 ms·
For Sale: Soviet Military Ferrite Core Memory Stack Cube and Manual
- a3voices 13y agoSeems like the kind of thing that you'd keep in your attic forever.
- jufo 13y agoTrue, I've got a 4k x 12bit core store in mine, and it's been there over 30 years :-)
- JonnieCache 13y agoNothing next to this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/1967-vintage-London-MELLOTRON-Programme-Effects-Generator-from-the-BBC-/321183275203?nma=true&si=tmAbGv85A7IcLM0%252Fnkfudu6qpfk%253D&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2557 http://www.ebay.com/itm/1967-vintage-London-MELLOTRON-Progra... My birthday is soon. Email in profile.
- jacquesm 13y agoWow, what a find. A tape based sampler. Amazing. That would be so much fun to restore to working condition.
- JonnieCache 13y agoIt's an offshoot of the Mellotron[1] which was basically the original sampler. The mellotron was/is a keyboard where pressing each key spooled out and played back an individual tape strip of a real string section, cello, flute etc. It's the string sound that's really famous and recognisable. The mechanisms make a VHS look simple, see the wiki article for diagrams. The linked machine is a read-write version of the mellotron, created especially for the BBC to do sound effects for radio programmes. One of the many one-of-a-kind cutting edge devices commissioned by the BBC in the glory days. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mellotron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mellotron
- hamiltonkibbe 13y agoAnd the Strawberry Fields flute sound!
- neverm0re 13y agoYou can build 'em out of essentially scrap parts fairly easily, actually. There's also dumps of the Melloton's sample reels floating around if you particularly want that sound rather than producing your own. Peter Christopherson and Chris Carter of Throbbing Gristle made their own tape loop sampler out of car tape decks, some simple soldering and a keyboard controller in the late 70s. They could control the pitch, rewind, forward, etc. and otherwise trigger various tape loops which was the basis of the band's sound. There's no reason to stop with tapes, though. MiniDisc is cheap, dead and has seamless shuffle (!!!) which means a whole stack of 'em could be chained to a mixer and played similarly. Still, you won't get the odd mechanical quirks and failings of using a cassette based system, especially if you start munging with manipulating playback speeds which may or may not be interesting to you.
- JonnieCache 13y ago>seamless shuffle (!!!) In a few years, when I inevitably get bored of melody and back into brain-melting glitch music, this is what I'm doing.
- neverm0re 13y agoYou might wanna check out Autechre's side project Gescom, specifically the 'MiniDisc' album: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minidisc_%28Gescom_minidisc%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minidisc_%28Gescom_minidisc%29 They abuse seamless shuffle with an 88 track minidisc album that's designed to be played on random shuffle. It basically sounds like a Farmer's Manual album, but it's still wild.
- JonnieCache 13y agoAutechre was the first thing I thought about when I read your post :) I was thinking more about hooking up a deck to an arduino and sending the "skip track" command at 20hz, or something like that. Record, chop, loop, and you're away.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jrabone 13y agoInteresting that the power plate indicates 60 Hz supply - yet the UK is 50 Hz. Perhaps stretching things for the title to claim it's "from" the BBC, as opposed to "as used by" - this one was most likely was made for the US market. I wonder what its provenance was?
- alex_hitchins 13y agoCould it be to filter out the 50Hz mains interference?
- michaelt 13y agoThe whole point of broadcast TV operating at mains frequency is because it makes interference less noticeable, accdording to sources like [1]. [1] http://www.adelia.co.uk/frame-rates-ntsc-pal/ http://www.adelia.co.uk/frame-rates-ntsc-pal/
- hcarvalhoalves 13y agoThat's crazy, you can see it's handmade. I wonder if it still works?
- nsxwolf 13y agoMight be fun to hook it up to an Arduino and see if you could read/write. I imagine it needs its own power supply.
- TheAnimus 13y agoIron core memory, so it would probably still read/write just fine, if not, fixing it shouldn't be too hard if you've got the hands for it.
- gvb 13y agoCore memory is non-volatile. If you hooked it up to a computer, you could read out what was written into it. Theoretically. NASA recovered the Challenger's core memory out of the ocean and was able to read it out months after the disaster. "On March 19, 1986, NASA announced that four of five Challenger General Purpose Computers (GPC) had been recovered from the Atlantic and moved to the IBM Federal Systems Division facility in Owego, NY. The GPCs were cleaned under controlled conditions and submerged in deionized water at Kennedy Space Center prior to air shipment March 16, 1986, to Owego. The GPC ferrite core memories were examined for any possible residual data -- a process that at the time was expected to take several months. This information was in the form of data--not onboard voice--and this path was pursued to add any possible additional information to the accident investigation. Many weeks later, it was found that the additional data frames did not measurably add to the information already gathered during the investigation." Ref: http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/conspiracy/q0258a.shtml http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/conspiracy/q0258a.shtml
- hcarvalhoalves 13y agoI was going to respond that to the parent, but you beat me :) Imagine hooking up and figuring out you can read it? Even better, imagine it contains nuke launch codes (in the best soviet-from-secret-agent-movie tradition)?!
- colanderman 13y agoThat's 4K words; each word seems to be 18 bits (assuming that's what "width" means). That's 9 kB by today's standards.
- unwind 13y agoActually traditionally it's 9 KB, or 9 KiB if you're into the modern binary prefixes. 9 kB would be 9,000 bytes, but this seems to be (4,096 * 18) / 8 = 9,216 bytes, which is exactly 9 KB. Or maybe I'm just a hopeless old f*rt for caring about things like this, and the world needs to get off my lawn.
- Arnor 13y agoI obsess over these pedantic differences too and I'm <30 so don't feel too bad. repeatedly pitches 3.5" floppies onto your lawn NERD SHAME EDIT: It's been a while... 3.5"
- derekp7 13y agoWhat must really drive you nuts about your 3.5" floppies are the fact that they are not 1.44 MB, or 1.44 MiB, or anything else that resembles 1.44 x some factor. They are actualy 1000 x 1024 x 1440 bytes (so 1440 KiB). The 1.44 on them is derived from a mixture of SI and Binary units.
- Arnor 13y agoI was fortunate enough to stop using them long before it bothered me, but now it does!
- mortehu 13y ago> 1000 x 1024 x 1440 I think you accidentally included a "1000 x".
- derekp7 13y agoYep, looks like I did. I'm having a hard time remembering memory and disk sizes so small. Actually, I think I meant for the 1440 to 1.44, so it is 1.44 x 1000 x 1024 (showing mixing the base-10 and base-2 units). So a MB in the 1.44 MB floppy is 1024 x 1000. Or, to put it another way, to get the number 1.44 out of 1474560 bytes, you first divide 1474560 by 1024, then by 1000. Weird.
- feritkan 13y agoSo this thing runs in space? They went to space with this?
- jacquesm 13y agoJudging by the time it was made it was at least intended to be used in a hostile environment. By 1983 the days of core memory were long gone so any application involving ferrite would have to be special to justify the additional cost over using semiconductor ram.
- MichaelMoser123 13y agoI think it was supposed to withstand the electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear explosion - Special toys for the military in preparation of WW3. "Soviet Cold War–era military aircraft often had avionics based on vacuum tubes due to limited solid-state capabilities and a belief that the vacuum-tube gear would survive better." says http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_puls http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_puls
- __alexs 13y agoI suspect it is more likely to be from terrestrial military hardware or a something like an http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ES_EVM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ES_EVM
- Nekorosu 13y agoAbsolutely overpriced.
- nsxwolf 13y agoOverpriced in terms of today's RAM prices (yes!), or overpriced for a Soviet 4K RAM module of its type? I've never seen one before so I have no idea.
- noobs 13y agoWikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory states that: "in 1980, the price of a 16-kW (kiloword, equivalent to 32kB) core memory board that fitted into a DEC Q-bus computer was around US $3,000." This one is a 4kW or 9kB from 1983, I'll let you do the math!
- jdubs 13y agoLet me just call my Soviet era RAM module guy.
- smackfu 13y agoI agree. Generally you can get completely obsolete very cool old hardware for not much of a premium on raw shipping cost. Yes, in theory, museums should want this stuff, but they don't. And it doesn't matter if the board cost $50k originally and is military-spec and uses crazy high-end components. Most sellers just want an alternative to throwing it out. There's a guy on Youtube who buys stuff like this and takes it apart to see what weird stuff they did: http://www.youtube.com/user/mikeselectricstuff http://www.youtube.com/user/mikeselectricstuff
- techdragon 13y agoYeah I love the look of this, but a 2K buy it now price, not exactly letting people find its true value. (not getting into free market stuff, just saying these kind of "i think its worth $X thousand, buy it or not" stuff isn't exactly the point of eBay)
- mikeash 13y agoThere's a "Make Offer" button. And Buy It Now stuff is really common on eBay these days. Surely "the point of eBay" is whatever people do with it?
- UnfalseDesign 13y agoeBay has been slowly moving away from being an auction house (the internet's garage sale) for years now. They have been moving towards becoming the "storefront" for people selling things without needing an actual physical store. Hence the attention to "Buy It Now" and "Add to Cart" over "Bid".
- lifeformed 13y agoThe $2k is just a price cap, you can still bid on it.
- themstheones 13y agoReminds me of this video of Adam Savage showing off his byte: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQWcIkoqXwg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQWcIkoqXwg
- ck2 13y agoIs it just me or is that "art". Nice design. Weren't the Russians making vacuum tubes for decades after the US stopped and "perfected" them?
- waterlesscloud 13y agoYeah, that design makes it a complete fetish item. I covet it just by looking at it.
- solistice 13y agoThose presumably hand soldered enamel wires cleanly laid out? I'm melting like leaded solder on a hot plate.
- tlrobinson 13y agoNot sure about vacuum tubes, but Nixie tubes were used until the 90s. Most vintage Nixie tubes are from the former Soviet Union.
- arethuza 13y agoThe Mig-25 was fairly famous for using vacuum tubes - initially this was seen as rather funny in the West then people realised that they actually had some distinct advantages, including alleged resiliance to the EMP from nuclear explosions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-25 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-25
- ak217 13y agoSomeone please buy this and loan it out to the Computer History Museum!
- mhb 13y agoThese aren't that rare. You can buy yourself a single board for significantly less: http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_sacat=0&_from=R40&_nkw=ferrite+core+memory&LH_Complete=1&rt=nc http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_sacat=0&_from=R40&_nkw=ferri...
- raphar 13y agobeautiful!
- consider_this 13y agoThis is a very cool find. Thanks for sharing.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoI wonder if it is radioactive. :-) There was a brief flurry of selling various rare Russian military parts that had been scavenged from equipment that had been left behind in the towns around Chernobyl. Probably not, and it is a fun artifact. I've got a number of PDP-8 core memories (actually in PDP-8's :-) which are much less rare. That said, if you're looking for a parent/child project, or just a fun project, you can make a bit of "core memory" out of a #2 iron nut, a couple of full bridges, and an opamp. We did this with the kids for a science project once and its a lot of fun. You get to learn about hysteresis, the inherent 'analog' nature of digital machines, and with careful planning you could impractically hide information in the spare nuts drawer in the garage :-).
- DenisM 13y agoI had a heap of these at home as a kid, only they were slightly different in that they ferrite rings and the wires were encased in a gel to reduce mechanical strain (so likely a later design). Had I only known they would be selling for thousands of dollars...
- JoeAltmaier 13y agoMine wasn't; after a while every time I set it down, little broken cores would rain down. They apparently decay over time.
- vsviridov 13y agoIt's kinda awesome, that the literal title of the manual is "Exploitation manual" :)
- 205guy 13y agoI suspect it's just the standard (for the time) term in Russian for what would be called a deployment manual and/or service manual in English. I've worked with old French documents titled "Manuel d'exploitation" that are essentially how to make the device/software work in production (installation/in use/maintenance).
- rits 13y agoAs an >30 russian I can confirm. "Руководство по эксплуатации" is the standart term in USSR for any type of the end user manuals. Now user manuals just the "user" manuals (Руководство пользователя).
- mhb 13y agoFor the money, I'd prefer a Curta calculator: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curta http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curta http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1311.R1.TR2.TRC1.A0.Xcurta+calcu&_nkw=curta+calculator&_sacat=0&_from=R40 http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1311.R...
- goatforce5 13y agoI know of someone who has a piece of EDSAC (or maybe EDSAC 2) on his shelf. It looks very similar to: http://www.chezfred.org.uk/University/ComputerXHistory/FirstComputers-1/1960-EDSAC-DSCN1489.htm http://www.chezfred.org.uk/University/ComputerXHistory/First... He happened to be in the vicinity as it was being decommissioned. It's sometimes used as a doorstop.
- sgt 13y agoI would love to buy this and interface to it via the GPIO pins of the Raspberry Pi. Perhaps the Pi could even piggyback onto the stack cube itself, and you could house it inside some kind of a glass container with inputs and output ports accessible from the outside. It'd certainly be a conversation starter, and let's face it, who doesn't love core memory?
- cpr 13y agoBrings back memories. I remember IBM 360 "large core storage" devices at the Naval Electronics Lab on Point Loma (San Diego, where I worked as a high school student)--boxes that held a MEGABYTE of core (I think several milliseconds per byte access, so more like a fast DASD), which cost a MILLION dollars. ($1/byte) We systems programmers thought we were in hog heaven, since most 360 mainframes of the day (1971) had 32KB or 64KB main memories. (Yes, KB.)
- nwh 13y agoPage archive for future reference — http://archive.is/fj080 http://archive.is/fj080
- mindslight 13y agoI wouldn't be surprised if Newark/Arrow/Avnet are still stocking these.
- VladRussian2 13y agothe search in Russian for "Блок памяти БП-20" leads to this http://www.ngpedia.ru/cgi-bin/getpage.exe?cn=61&uid=0.38113870145753&inte=6 http://www.ngpedia.ru/cgi-bin/getpage.exe?cn=61&uid=0.381138... which points to "АСВТ-М" series of machines used in all areas of economics, government, education, and military as well. http://www.icfcst.kiev.ua/MUSEUM/PHOTOS/M-6000_r.html http://www.icfcst.kiev.ua/MUSEUM/PHOTOS/M-6000_r.html Usually the military components would have "ВП" stamp ("Военная приемка" - "accepted by military QA") - at least that was the case with electronic components from torpedo and cruise missiles at the navy base hardware dump that we sourced our hobby electronics components from in the childhood, and this doesn't seem to have it : http://sovietsouvenirs.com/catalog/images/ic/core_memory-15-01.jpg http://sovietsouvenirs.com/catalog/images/ic/core_memory-15-...
- DennisP 13y agoMy dad used to work on mainframes at IBM. When I was about seven years old he took me to work one day and showed me memory like this. Except he could open the door and you could look at a whole cabinet full of crisscrossed wires.
- rdtsc 13y ago4096 words @ 400kHz Logical "1" - 20-60mV Logical "0" - 10mV (not more)
- galaktor 13y agoReminds me of a project of a friend (which I submitted a while ago): Magnetic core memory using Arduino http://www.corememoryshield.com/ http://www.corememoryshield.com/ previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3888926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3888926
- flux_w42 13y agoI'm wondering if it still contains data, if it's working.