That's a Nywfe! I have been waiting for years for that one to come up in your vlog Dave.

Dave, The ferrite core memory was, to the best of my knowledge, constructed by hand. Women actually weaving the wires through the cores. We had a substitute instructor in college for a hardware class who had worked on developing these types of memories. One of the problems that he had was heat buildup because of the density. Running faster needed more voltage which caused more heat. Each plane of cores was one bit of a word, you'd run them in parallel to build whole words. the planes would be built s close as possible to save room. One experiment in cooling had the memories in a large tube and cooled mineral oil flowing over them to remove the heat. But it kept failing at the same place over and over. What they found was that the flowing oil was making certain beads spin and wear away the insulation from the wires causing a short. Solution was guide vanes in the tube to smooth out the oil flow. #talesfromthedarkages

I sitting at home, in the US summer, being sick, and hoping you posted a mailbag to brighten up my day. You have have achieved that. Thank you, Dave.

That knife had me in stitches.

That memory board looks really cool. I've never seen something like that before.

omg after a bazillion of mailbag vids I finally found the one introducing the standard everyday use australian knife. yay.

The knife show staring Dave.

Absolutely loved seeing the microscope closeup of the core memory. They were probably 16 bit words, but may have been more. I'm sure someone will know. The Control Data Cyber mainframes had 60bit words, and the core memory in those was quite large -- extended core memory came along later, and the ferrite cores in ECM boards were truly microscopic.

27:20 You're referring to this Computer for Apollo I came across this a long time back. Extremely interesting stuff, and it's interesting to see how far we've come with computers and what-not

ahh 1970, I remember it well. Army Basic Training, Advanced training, a short visit home to make a baby with my new wife, and I was off to Vietnam. I recall my first computer, a Commodore 128, when I first got it, I had it in my head that when the computer read from the memory, it could be changed and the entire program had to be written back to the disk. Thankfully my son was there to straighten me out on that.

Gotta love the Crocodile Dundee quote! :D

The deadpan way in which you opened the package with the knife had me in stitches. Hahaha.

My grandfather worked on anti-balistic missiles back in the vacuum tube computer days. He told me that those old magnetic memory banks were hand wired, and the poor ladies who did it often didn't last more than about a month because it would drive them crazy!

That Chinese meter looks like having been made by a serious company or institution, not just cheap mass production. This was at a time when China was struggling hard to get up to date with technologies after decades of political isolation.

From the net: 1. In spite of considerable effort, no one successfully automated the production of core, which remained a manual task into the 1970s. 2. But manufacturing it was a delicate job, entrusted mostly to women using microscopes and steady hands to thread thin wires through holes about the diameter of a pencil lead.

For the record, a word of memory is two bytes. In a little-endian machine (e.g. Intel x86) the bytes are read in backwards, in a big-endian machine the bytes are read in in order.

I used to use and repair Data General 16K magnetic core memory boards when I had a summer job in high school. That was about 1977 or so and RAM was out but the core boards were still in use in lots of machines. They had MUCH smaller magnetic cores than this one. Very convenient as you could load your test program in the board, then move it to another machine and run it! Didn't loose it's data on power down!

Well done to Stephan for the ferrite memory find! Very cool!

Pause on ''About the Author'', I love what Barry's dad did with him and that truck, what a lucky lad. Life is all about luck. Hope you all have some soon.

Magnetic core memory! Awesome! It's hilarious that 40 years later, RAM still works on the rows/columns concept.

Love the ferrite core memory. Built a small 4-byte matrix once, couldn't figure out how to drive it. Hoping you make a video about writing/reading to it.

Jesus, I actually laughed out loud when you pulled out the enormous knife. There is no way you should ever go back to your little one. Brilliant.

Those magnetic core memories were actually woven by hand, thanks to a team of women with steady hands and lots of patience.

The ferrite memory is so awesome, Dave, thanks for showing it up close. So easy to picture how it actually works, unlike, say, the micro SD! Please do try to get it working to store a few words. That would be a fantastic video.

I used to work for Digital Equipment Corp in NYC in 1978 as a Sr Field Engeneer and had a few accounts that had some old equipment that still used that type of core memory but it was 8k-32k for each board I worked on LSI 11/23, PDP 11/34A PDP-11/40, 11/45 11/60 PDP11/70 & VAX 11/780 & VAX 11/750

Crocodile Dundee, Monty Python, Beautiful vintage technology... you're hitting ALL the buttons! I laughed out (really) loud at 23:43 (it's 5am on a monday morning). Great video, Dave.

The compartment and connector on the back of the WiFi Radio is for docking an Apple iPod/iPhone etc. You can clearly see the Apple 30 pin connector. Its not for powering the device from a battery source like you guessed/assumed.

"Let's open Franky's package, shall we?!" LOL!

The 'ram' board was amazing to see. If you have the space on the wall, you should do a timeline starting with that (or something even older), through things like a platter from an ancient HD, 5.25" and 3.5" floppies, CD DVD and then a micro SD.

Hope you can fix the DAB radio in a future vid, Dave. At 21:54 it looks like there is a 'puncture' in the flat flex, just below the '3' in the part number.

Clapped my hands and smiled with glee when i saw the big knife coming, god you are just an amazing man hahahaha

That is a proper Australian knife. Good for skinning crocs or opening mail.

Saturday -Sunday - Blermsday , who cares as long as I get a mailbag vid Thank you Dave

So, out of curiosity, I sat down and did some counting of the rows and columns in that core memory and came up with the following: 64 columns - AKA a 64 bit computer! 100 rows: Each row in the grid stored one word of data 4 sets of grids = 400 words :D That works out to be 3.15 kilobytes of data in modern storage parlance, using 8-bit words as we do these days. And having said that, a 64 bit computer in 1970 was a rare thing indeed! While word-length wasn't standardized as it is today, even some of the most complex systems like the IBM System/360 only used 32-bit words. And hefty machines costing in the realm of $10,000,000 (In 1960's dollars), the so-called "supercomputers" like the CDC 6600, used a 60-bit words! What really blows the mind though is what has happened to data density in the last 40 years! On a chip die smaller than your pinkie-finger's nail, and about as thick, you can pack in 1,099,511,627,776 bits of information! (1.09 trillion bits or 128GB, the largest currently available MicroSD card on the market) In the same volume as that core memory module, you could probably store several hundred terabytes of data with modern flash memory!

loving the knife dave. nice bit of overkill

Wow, what a gift! Those things were amazing (still are) and expensive. You could hook up a board of LEDs to show it reacts to the pulses. Afterwards frame it. Treasure that beauty.

@24:46 I was half expecting 'Its that.... Anthrax again'😂

what a fantastic piece of functional art. would love to see it fired up thx 4 sharing this 1

The multi-metre was a real flash back, I'd forgotten about those old Flukes, they were standard issue back in the day.

I would love to see more on the core memory, that looked really cool.

Dave, I think a standard "Hello World" would be apt for that memory!

I lost it when you started opening the first package with that ridiculous knife aha

Laugh all you like at ferrite core RAM. But when you turn off the power you don't lose the magnetisation. Turn it back on and continue where you left off. We're slowly getting back to that type of computer.

"Crocodile" Dundee knife ! :) Nice one !

Sunday night mailbag is the best! Keep it up!

Love the new knife!!!

Starting at 7:48 you can see how one type of core memory was made in the 1970's Manufacturing 1A and 2B ESS Memory - AT&T Archives

Going all Dundee on that mail are we?

OH! They used that Ferrite core memory on the Saturn V Rocket! Fascinating how it works.

I love that Aussie knife. Reminds me of Crocodile Dundee !!! Greetings from Switzerland !!

LOL! When you pulled out the big knife it reminded me of Crocodile Dundee!

The knife on the book is a Victorynox, because it has the typical can opener. Wenger has another type :-)

Its only 01:40 here in the United Kingdom on a Monday hehhe perfect time for EEVblog

For the core memory card. Remember that you have X and Y and sense lines. A read is a destructive read, so you need to do a "write back'

That memory board was phenomenal. Please do write some data to it.

The core memory used in the Western Electric No 1 and No 1A ESS machines were much nicer. The memory was not destroyed on a read operation due to a bias wire ( the forth wire) in the core. We had line-up after line-up of frames containing similar core arrays used to store writable data such as network path information etc. Thanks for the video. I can smell the shellac.

thumbs up for that bowie knife!

Dave is entering the frantic mail bag murder zone with that monster knife!!

"jeez that was a good banana." -That Crazy Aussie Bloke

1:55 finally you're showing your Australian roots

My old high school (Left in 2010) still uses those style DMMs...

Dave, the only truly fair thing to store and retrieve from the ferrite memory would be a Space Invader, with that much ram, maybe even four off them.

May I suggest an eight bit art " Thumbs up" for the memory test.

Love the knife! Perfect size too!

Dave, Have You ever seen a Kangaroo in real life ?

in Apollo video girls usually create ROM , where processor code is stored, not RAM.

oh man that memory board looks awesome. i would love to see data written to that

Those I.C.s will be the sense and X/Y drivers. The signal read back from the core is insanely tiny, so those IC's amplify the output of the cores to then drive that signal back to the larger memory logic. There will be a driver/amplifier for each column of memory, and they may be cleverly multiplexed depending on the design of your particular board. Also, no surprise in not finding much information about them. There were off the shelf sense amplifiers and drivers for core memory, but many manufactures rolled their own silicon for their core memory. Also, you can definitely bypass or isolate those chips and use a simple transistor driver circuit for a small number of cores. Probably be a bit of a fiddle figuring out the voltage and current levels required to sustain a stored bit without overdriving and smoking those insanely tiny wires. I've attached a link for a manual on a DEC PDP11 core memory that is pretty much all you need to know about driving core memory, and the voltage levels and such will probably be fairly close, so you can use the data and schematics in there to devise a discreet circuit to drive yours. bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dec/pdp11/memory/MM11-E_CoreMemoryManual.pdf

Dave, if nobody else mentioned, that internet radio lcd patch cable has a hole under the " rti display " text ! one or two connections are severed there to ! Look at 21:40 minutes in your video. Like your crocodile dandy knife ! BTW i have an aunt and she lives in NSW somewhere :-))

I have seen videos of an "asembely line" where ladys was siitting and putting ferrit memory together BY HAND!!

Holy crap! It's Dave! In the future!

Its almost 4 AM here at Latvia !

wow that memory! ...Beauty!!!

1:59 LOL you totally remind me of photonic induction!

Ah Franky, thought he sounded familiar. His silicone test leads are pretty decent for the money leads to chuck in your toolbox

HI Dave! Awesome mail! Thanks

Wow I never seen magnetic memory that close up before!

That hunting knife ... wielded by an Aussie bloke ... Wolf Creek.... true story, right, of Mick Taylor? Or is that Dave Jones. The movie scene with the knife and the famous quote... Mick Taylor: What was it your mate said again? Oh, yeah, that's not a knife - *this* is a knife!

The issue with that DAB radio could be the hole in the cable, its about 2cm above the "repair"

TL062 is an Operational Amplifier...low noise unit.... with Jfet input

those pure lcd screens are well known to be flaky, the sad part is both the flex and lcd are available as spare parts. fixed a few evokes and other pure radios. also that memory wafer is cool never seen one in real life, i have seen a converter board which basically plugs in the same but takes 1kb memory chips, i guess it was a way to increase the memory.

IBM bought the patent rights for core memory and as far as I know was the biggest patent settlement ever.

Low light also...the light blue of your rubber cover is entering the camera that is under exposing the main subject....the former darker blue was better because we could see the object in a better way.

Monday, 00:00 here. Nice timing Dave!

the DMM is just digital chop sticks..they used the electrical resistance to calculate their caloric intake XD

I would love to see that old ferrite memory board actually working. Pretty-please ?!

You must have bought that nail cleaner just for this clip. XD You can thank the legendary Jim Bowie for that design.

Love to see a hack on the ferrite memory card. Have seen drawing in school not up close a personal like your video. Some one out there do you have one of the IBM cylinders that fit in an automated matrix; similar to current pop machines. Would be a great medieval hack.

Word size is specified by the processor architecture. Typically 16 32 or 64 bits, but back then, I don't know what the word size could be.

Ha, I'm going to SDSU for EE. Circuit analysis 430 in the fall!

That ferrite thing was very interesting!

Lol love the Mick Dundee reference haha haha. Prob one of you best mail bags yet!!!! I wonder if that memory module has any data on it? Or time has wiped it away? Could unlock some secret data lol

looking on the Memory card, that green connector slot is very similar to the card from the saturn 5 rocket you have

Looks like a ferrite core NASA video segment here > Weaving software into core memory by hand

Nice memory Dave 👍

Love the Mick Dundee reference!

Yep, use ferrites with arduino or attiny as a external memory! beauty)

try this video in the1970 vintage Magnetic Core Memory > World's First RAM Chip

Re the BRRI DVM, besides the Fluke you mention the presentation looks very much like a Kikusui 1506 from Japan ca. 1990 which I have here. I guess were both styled on the Flukes

That flatflex looked like it had a hole in the middle of it about 1 cm from the original repair.