A paper bag of magnetic cores disappeared while the engineers were out to lunch:
> But shortly after, the engineer called and asked if the shipment was there. This did not sound too good. With a little detective work we found a cleaning crew had worked in the office while we were gone. A little more sleuthing revealed that the bag had been accidentally knocked into a waste basket, and that load of waste had already been dumped into the plant incinerator. The incinerator ashes were spread over a concrete floor, and sure enough there were small magnetic cores, about one sixteenth of an inch in outside diameter, mixed in with the ashes. The CP-642 B had 32,768 30-bit words in its memory, meaning, with spares, there were just about one million magnetic cores in the ashes. At ten cents per core, the ashes held about one hundred thousand dollars worth of cores.
We reasoned the cores were the result of a firing process, and the heat of the incinerator probably had not hurt them. Maybe it even made them better. A quick test of some of the cores picked from the ashes revealed the cores were as good as ever. We and a contingent of Univac engineers & technicians spent a fun filled day rescuing the cores from the ashes with long needles. The cores were strung into the machine’s memory planes, and it passed all performance and environmental tests with flying colors.
That entire history is worth a read if you are interested in computer history of the military variety.
Thanks for that charming bit of history. Humorous but also astonishing that the cores were salvageable after such rude treatment. The use of such cores was before my time in the computer world so I have no experience with them. I wondered if the tiny cores could have been scooped out of the ashes by a magnet. I'm sure the engineers would have thought of it, I'm guessing that would have damaged them. (Or more likely it wasn't even possible to collect them that way...)
Threading the burnt cores onto needles would definitely not be my idea of fun. Though I imagine a needle full of them would resemble a string of beads. Come to think of it, as described those cores would make a mighty interesting necklace (and FWIW my wife thought so too).
Interesting story. By the way, the NTDS computer system you mentioned was very successful and important for military computing, but it's almost forgotten now.
https://ethw.org/First-Hand:The_Naval_Tactical_Data_System_i...
A paper bag of magnetic cores disappeared while the engineers were out to lunch:
> But shortly after, the engineer called and asked if the shipment was there. This did not sound too good. With a little detective work we found a cleaning crew had worked in the office while we were gone. A little more sleuthing revealed that the bag had been accidentally knocked into a waste basket, and that load of waste had already been dumped into the plant incinerator. The incinerator ashes were spread over a concrete floor, and sure enough there were small magnetic cores, about one sixteenth of an inch in outside diameter, mixed in with the ashes. The CP-642 B had 32,768 30-bit words in its memory, meaning, with spares, there were just about one million magnetic cores in the ashes. At ten cents per core, the ashes held about one hundred thousand dollars worth of cores.
We reasoned the cores were the result of a firing process, and the heat of the incinerator probably had not hurt them. Maybe it even made them better. A quick test of some of the cores picked from the ashes revealed the cores were as good as ever. We and a contingent of Univac engineers & technicians spent a fun filled day rescuing the cores from the ashes with long needles. The cores were strung into the machine’s memory planes, and it passed all performance and environmental tests with flying colors.
That entire history is worth a read if you are interested in computer history of the military variety.