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> -----Original Message----- |
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> From: Peter Humphrey <peter@××××××××××××.uk> |
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> Sent: Sunday, December 11, 2022 3:35 AM |
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> To: gentoo-user@l.g.o |
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> Subject: [OT] Re: [gentoo-user] NAS and replacing with larger drives |
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> |
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> On Friday, 9 December 2022 10:34:00 GMT I wrote: |
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> |
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> > in the 1970s the national grid was monitored and analysed with a |
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> > Ferranti Argus 500 machine with 24KB RAM and a 2MB disk. It was common |
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> > for American visitors to believe that was just driving the control engineers' |
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> > displays, and where was the main computer? |
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> |
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> Er... There was no RAM in those days, not of the type we know today. In fact it was 2-microsecond core store. Each tiny ferromagnetic toroid was threaded with one X wire, one Y wire and (I think it was) a sync pulse wire. A remarkable labour of love to build such a thing. |
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> |
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> -- |
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> Regards, |
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> Peter. |
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> |
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Well, it wasn't built with transistors, but it was Random Access Memory. As opposed to Sequential Access Memory like mercury delay lines. And it was periodic refresh, just like most modern RAM. |
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That 24KB though would have been literally 196,608 ferrite cores (assuming it was an 8 bit byte on that system), and they were probably hand-soldered. |
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Although it looks like the original Argus line used 12 bit words. So it was probably a 6 bit byte. Still, a lot of soldering. |
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Interestingly, the Argus 400 and 500 series was one of the first systems to use multilayer PCBs and the company had to develop a lot of the techniques for creating those themselves. |
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LMP |