Bill,
You are 100% mistaken. You have seriously misread the information.
His commentary and web page are written in the past tense to
indicate that "core memory" is not used in today's computers,
not that the boards do not have the cores in them now.
He is selling, in addition to the core memory boards, the controller
cards that ran a stack of the core memory cards. He is not saying
that the cards are really controller cards and not core memory cards.
I got a card a while back and the core memory card is exactly as
stated and shown. There are cores.
My only stupidity was having to pay the $20 or so when I should have
had a free sample from years ago.
Dave
Bill Yakowenko wrote:
>
> Marvin <marvin_at_rain.org> wrote:
> ] More interesting stuff from ebay.
> ] http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=43065424
>
> Beware; in the past this guy has offerred "core memory planes" for
> sale several times, even on this list. But if you had read the
> fine print you would have found that there were no cores - just
> the rectangular PC-board "frame" in which the cores used to reside.
> I suppose you could call that a plane, but it isn't what most
> compu-geeks would think when hearing the word in that context.
>
> In this case, he includes some text from an "actual" customer
> ranting about how cool his core memory board is, describing at
> length the 1024 core bits and yada yada yada, but if you read
> the all the way to the end you'll find that what he's actually
> offerring are the controller cards - not the 1K bit planes that
> he describes in such detail. Classic bait-and-switch.
>
> In fact, even when he was earlier selling the core memory boards,
> they didn't have the cores, so this rant is obviously marketing
> delirium. Nothing that is an outright lie, but misleading as Hell,
> unless somebody actually things a PC board frame with no components
> is awesomely cool and "looks great under a microscope". Tell me
> that isn't engineered to fool people into thinking they're getting
> real core memory. Sheesh! And "whatever was last written (back
> in the 50s) on the planes I bought is still there" - nope, not
> "there" as in "on the planes I bought", but "there" as in "wherever
> those cores happen to be now".
>
> As far as I'm concerned, this guy is a rip-off artist. If he
> was simply selling Univac memory controller boards, I'd be more
> than half interested. And oddly enough, as near as I can tell,
> these controller boards actually *do* have some core bits left
> on them. (Are "windings" the same as cores, or is this another
> aspect of his marketing ingenuity?) So in that sense they may
> be more interesting than his former offerings.
>
> Anyway, seeing how far he'll go to be misleading, I don't trust
> him. I get the feeling that if I read enough fine print, I'd find
> that he's actually just selling pictures of those things, or
> pictures of something else that had once been in the same room
> with those things, or...
>
> It's really a shame that something like a Univac memory unit would
> end up in the hands of somebody like this, who would hack it to
> bits and then try to sell the broken fragments by being so misleading.
>
> Sadly,
> Bill.
>
> PS. I suppose it is possible that he once sold an actual core plane
> with cores in it, and that's what this testimonial is describing.
> But the first time I saw that ad of his, I rushed over to his web
> page and found him offerring "coreless" memory planes. And even
> then he was ranting and raving about how cool cores were, in the
> same way he does here, only mentioning at the end that these boards
> don't actually have any core. So again, there might not be any
> outright lies in any of this, but be sure to read *ALL* of the fine
> print before you consider dealing with this guy.
Received on Thu Nov 19 1998 - 22:40:33 GMT