Interesting that the power plate indicates 60 Hz supply - yet the UK is 50 Hz. Perhaps stretching things for the title to claim it's "from" the BBC, as opposed to "as used by" - this one was most likely was made for the US market. I wonder what its provenance was?
It's an offshoot of the Mellotron[1] which was basically the original sampler. The mellotron was/is a keyboard where pressing each key spooled out and played back an individual tape strip of a real string section, cello, flute etc. It's the string sound that's really famous and recognisable. The mechanisms make a VHS look simple, see the wiki article for diagrams.
The linked machine is a read-write version of the mellotron, created especially for the BBC to do sound effects for radio programmes. One of the many one-of-a-kind cutting edge devices commissioned by the BBC in the glory days.
You can build 'em out of essentially scrap parts fairly easily, actually. There's also dumps of the Melloton's sample reels floating around if you particularly want that sound rather than producing your own.
Peter Christopherson and Chris Carter of Throbbing Gristle made their own tape loop sampler out of car tape decks, some simple soldering and a keyboard controller in the late 70s. They could control the pitch, rewind, forward, etc. and otherwise trigger various tape loops which was the basis of the band's sound.
There's no reason to stop with tapes, though. MiniDisc is cheap, dead and has seamless shuffle (!!!) which means a whole stack of 'em could be chained to a mixer and played similarly. Still, you won't get the odd mechanical quirks and failings of using a cassette based system, especially if you start munging with manipulating playback speeds which may or may not be interesting to you.
They abuse seamless shuffle with an 88 track minidisc album that's designed to be played on random shuffle. It basically sounds like a Farmer's Manual album, but it's still wild.
Autechre was the first thing I thought about when I read your post :)
I was thinking more about hooking up a deck to an arduino and sending the "skip track" command at 20hz, or something like that. Record, chop, loop, and you're away.
I wonder if it is radioactive. :-) There was a brief flurry of selling various rare Russian military parts that had been scavenged from equipment that had been left behind in the towns around Chernobyl.
Probably not, and it is a fun artifact. I've got a number of PDP-8 core memories (actually in PDP-8's :-) which are much less rare. That said, if you're looking for a parent/child project, or just a fun project, you can make a bit of "core memory" out of a #2 iron nut, a couple of full bridges, and an opamp. We did this with the kids for a science project once and its a lot of fun. You get to learn about hysteresis, the inherent 'analog' nature of digital machines, and with careful planning you could impractically hide information in the spare nuts drawer in the garage :-).
Usually the military components would have "ВП" stamp ("Военная приемка" - "accepted by military QA") - at least that was the case with electronic components from torpedo and cruise missiles at the navy base hardware dump that we sourced our hobby electronics components from in the childhood, and this doesn't seem to have it :
What must really drive you nuts about your 3.5" floppies are the fact that they are not 1.44 MB, or 1.44 MiB, or anything else that resembles 1.44 x some factor. They are actualy 1000 x 1024 x 1440 bytes (so 1440 KiB). The 1.44 on them is derived from a mixture of SI and Binary units.
Yep, looks like I did. I'm having a hard time remembering memory and disk sizes so small. Actually, I think I meant for the 1440 to 1.44, so it is 1.44 x 1000 x 1024 (showing mixing the base-10 and base-2 units). So a MB in the 1.44 MB floppy is 1024 x 1000. Or, to put it another way, to get the number 1.44 out of 1474560 bytes, you first divide 1474560 by 1024, then by 1000. Weird.
Typical usage was to pack 3 6-bit characters into a word on these machines if you weren't simply using it as integer data. So it's "really" something closer to 12k of text or (assuming all the computations fit in the different word sizes) 16k of integer/pointer data.
Oh sure, "real" English text processing only ever worked with EBCDIC and ASCII (and obviously everyone else in the world had to wait for yet another bit to be added). But an awful lot of work was done with all the caps-only sixbit encodings (like BCDIC -- without the E), including source code and documentation that we all would view as classic "text" tasks these days.
The only real point was that early computers were packing an awful lot of useful information into some really tiny quarters. Just four of these cores would have provided an environment very similar in space to a C64.
The Mig-25 was fairly famous for using vacuum tubes - initially this was seen as rather funny in the West then people realised that they actually had some distinct advantages, including alleged resiliance to the EMP from nuclear explosions:
You can't really "measure" or double-blind test how well this thing kills people. Only if you have well developed taste can you appreciate the finer details, the warmth, the clarity, the fidelity.
> Only if you have well developed taste can you appreciate the finer details, the warmth, the clarity, the fidelity.
There are reports of ground crews for MiG-25's drinking the hydraulic fluid for the planes, which was apparently based on ethanol. Truly an aircraft for those with a discerning palette.
I've heard similar stories of soviet soldiers in Afghanistan in the 80's draining the hydraulic fluid from their armored vehicles because it was ethanol, and drinking it...
It is clearly a beautiful design - and the workmanship is incredible as well. I can't imagine how long it must have taken to build just one of those things. It reminds me of the workings of a fine mechanical watch.
That said, I think it's grossly overpriced. Probably worth about $800-$1k (based on it's similarity to classic mechanical watches).
Yep, there's huge demand for certain NOS (new old stock) tubes used in tube microphones (like the Neumann U47, U67 etc). I think one of the big factories has just opened up again actually.
I suspect it's just the standard (for the time) term in Russian for what would be called a deployment manual and/or service manual in English. I've worked with old French documents titled "Manuel d'exploitation" that are essentially how to make the device/software work in production (installation/in use/maintenance).
As an >30 russian I can confirm. "Руководство по эксплуатации" is the standart term in USSR for any type of the end user manuals. Now user manuals just the "user" manuals (Руководство пользователя).
This artifact belongs in the hands of someone who can answer that question for himself. I know he's not me; I would waste its potential by enclosing it in a Plexiglas cube and displaying it on my desk. "Look at this curiosity! No, please don't touch it."
it is just ferrittes strung on copper wire lattice, no component to "break" until it is really physically broken.
What i've been wondering for many years about is why such schema wasn't miniaturized? We have disk plates with high density in HDDs, and the magnetic head is physically moving. Imagine if instead of the magnetic head there would be a [miniaturized] lattice similar in principle to the one on this image http://sovietsouvenirs.com/catalog/images/ic/core_memory-15-.... The similar principle is used in flash memory, yet in the flash memory it is electrons trapped in the floating gate instead of magnetic domains with all the problems (durability, sustained write speed) of flash vs. magnetic disks.
Rust is still a problem with those little ferrite rings, though.
Depending on the environment you maintain for this device, it can actually be pretty delicate. I have some old (~25 year-old) electric motors, where the magnetic properties of the bigger ferrite rings have been degraded by rust. I guess it probably depends of the quality of the piece.
This means there could be one tiny rusty ring in one of the center planes, and that would effectively result in a bad block that exhibits inconsistent behavior for that single bit. A person would have to test for that. It could be programmed around, and you could still have a fully functional object, minus one byte or word (or bit, depending on how you approach it).
You'd also want to keep it free of dust, since dust CAN be metallic, magnetic and conductive. The item for sale looks like it's been taken care of nicely!
Since it's "solid state" (none of those parts move, do they?), I don't see why you need to leave it exposed to the outside air. Could you just cast the whole thing in plastic, or would it overheat? Maybe a mineral-oil bath?
The permeability/permittivity of the surrounding substance probably needs to be accounted for. I find it quite feasible that mineral oil (or plastic) would attenuate and/or slow down the changing magnetic fields.
From wiki: "A typical magnetic region on a hard-disk platter (as of 2006) is about 200–250 nanometers wide (in the radial direction of the platter) and extends about 25–30 nanometers in the down-track direction". It's not trivial to say "Let's get X and miniaturize it to this scale".
Flash memory uses standard semiconductor techniques, and HDDs simply employ platters with tightly controlled properties.
Core memory is non-volatile. If you hooked it up to a computer, you could read out what was written into it. Theoretically.
NASA recovered the Challenger's core memory out of the ocean and was able to read it out months after the disaster.
"On March 19, 1986, NASA announced that four of five Challenger General Purpose Computers (GPC) had been recovered from the Atlantic and moved to the IBM Federal Systems Division facility in Owego, NY. The GPCs were cleaned under controlled conditions and submerged in deionized water at Kennedy Space Center prior to air shipment March 16, 1986, to Owego. The GPC ferrite core memories were examined for any possible residual data -- a process that at the time was expected to take several months. This information was in the form of data--not onboard voice--and this path was pursued to add any possible additional information to the accident investigation. Many weeks later, it was found that the additional data frames did not measurably add to the information already gathered during the investigation."
I was going to respond that to the parent, but you beat me :)
Imagine hooking up and figuring out you can read it? Even better, imagine it contains nuke launch codes (in the best soviet-from-secret-agent-movie tradition)?!
I once got a couple SPARCClassic-sized disk packs. Their paperwork said they belonged to an investment bank that didn't survive one of the many meltdowns of the late 20th century. All of them had piles of data that should have been erased before the sale.
The SPARCClassic and its stack of disks is still quite impressive.
I remember IBM 360 "large core storage" devices at the Naval Electronics Lab on Point Loma (San Diego, where I worked as a high school student)--boxes that held a MEGABYTE of core (I think several milliseconds per byte access, so more like a fast DASD), which cost a MILLION dollars. ($1/byte)
We systems programmers thought we were in hog heaven, since most 360 mainframes of the day (1971) had 32KB or 64KB main memories. (Yes, KB.)
Judging by the time it was made it was at least intended to be used in a hostile environment. By 1983 the days of core memory were long gone so any application involving ferrite would have to be special to justify the additional cost over using semiconductor ram.
I think it was supposed to withstand the electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear explosion -
Special toys for the military in preparation of WW3.
"Soviet Cold War–era military aircraft often had avionics based on vacuum tubes due to limited solid-state capabilities and a belief that the vacuum-tube gear would survive better." says http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_puls
I would love to buy this and interface to it via the GPIO pins of the Raspberry Pi.
Perhaps the Pi could even piggyback onto the stack cube itself, and you could house it inside some kind of a glass container with inputs and output ports accessible from the outside.
It'd certainly be a conversation starter, and let's face it, who doesn't love core memory?
I had a heap of these at home as a kid, only they were slightly different in that they ferrite rings and the wires were encased in a gel to reduce mechanical strain (so likely a later design). Had I only known they would be selling for thousands of dollars...
My dad used to work on mainframes at IBM. When I was about seven years old he took me to work one day and showed me memory like this. Except he could open the door and you could look at a whole cabinet full of crisscrossed wires.
Yeah I love the look of this, but a 2K buy it now price, not exactly letting people find its true value. (not getting into free market stuff, just saying these kind of "i think its worth $X thousand, buy it or not" stuff isn't exactly the point of eBay)
eBay has been slowly moving away from being an auction house (the internet's garage sale) for years now. They have been moving towards becoming the "storefront" for people selling things without needing an actual physical store. Hence the attention to "Buy It Now" and "Add to Cart" over "Bid".
Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory states that: "in 1980, the price of a 16-kW (kiloword, equivalent to 32kB) core memory board that fitted into a DEC Q-bus computer was around US $3,000."
This one is a 4kW or 9kB from 1983, I'll let you do the math!
I agree. Generally you can get completely obsolete very cool old hardware for not much of a premium on raw shipping cost. Yes, in theory, museums should want this stuff, but they don't. And it doesn't matter if the board cost $50k originally and is military-spec and uses crazy high-end components. Most sellers just want an alternative to throwing it out.
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