A pretty impressive piece of gear. Being younger than you, my
introduction to memory when I started working at IBM (1965) was of a
more technologically advanced device. For a while I worked on a
manufacturing machine controller that did wire wrapping. It had a
little core memory that was about 4"x4" and stored 256 bits. Pretty
primitive now but I'll bet you'd have been willing to pay a lot for a
device like that in the early 50s. :-)
Chuck Norcutt
On 12/12/2013 5:19 PM, Jim Nichols wrote:
> As a young engineer, my first assignment was to calculate the nozzle
> plate shapes for a flexible plate nozzle for the AEDC 16-Ft Transonic
> Wind Tunnel, then under construction. The shapes had to vary from a
> simple contraction to a Mach 1.6 contour, and the process had to be done
> by 16 pairs of jacks, without over stressing the steel plates. And,
> other than the basic supersonic shapes calculated by folks at Cal-Tech,
> it was all done on Friden and Marchant desk calculators.
>
> To move the jacks from contour to contour, a series of steps were chosen
> that stayed within stress limits, as determined from curvature
> calculations. These steps were then stored in L-shaped pegs on a
> mechanical memory drum, with the shapes transferred to cam-driven
> readers and fed to vacuum-tube amplifiers which supplied the driving
> signals to the ball-bearing screw jacks.
>
> Bear in mind that this was all done in the early 1950s.
>
> This photo, taken from my technical report, shows the mechanical memory
> drum and the console which contained the drum drive system, the transfer
> plate, and the individual jack amplifiers. The console and system were
> designed to our specs and provided by an engineering company whose name
> does not come to mind after 60 years.
>
> http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/OldNick/Mechanical+Memory+Drum.jpg.html
>
> Memory has come a long way since then. :-)
>
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