I have several jars of ferrite cores made by IBM sometime in the late
1950's. I don't know exactly what size they are, but they can be
hand-wired without a stereo microscope.
I know, because I built a plane of 1x64x64 when I was in high school in
1971. (I was very determined to build my own computer.) The project was
abandoned when I went away for college, which was probably a good thing,
because my analog design skills were not up to creating the drive and sense
circuitry.
As I recall, I used something like #60 enameled wire. One of the
challenges was stripping the insulation off the ends of the wires without
damaging the copper.
If anyone is seriously intending to build a demo core memory system, I'd be
glad to provide a couple of hundred cores. I'd recommend something like a
16x16 array, unless you're looking for a project to make a 20-to-life
sentence go faster.
----
John Dykstra jdykstra_at_nortelnetworks.com
Principal Software Architect voice: ESN 454-1604
Enterprise Solutions fax: ESN 667-8549
Received on Wed Apr 21 1999 - 09:43:03 BST