Show us your junk!

Here is another piece of junk, I found on my attic.

Does anyone have an idea what it is and where it comes from?

I will post a close up later.

Here is another piece of junk, I found on my attic.

Does anyone have an idea what it is and where it comes from?

I will post a close up later.

That looks like a core memory module of sorts, but for what specifically, I have no idea.

- Gough

I agree, sounds like a memory or a grid for some kind of electromagnetic component

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory

For some reason, the company I worked for bought a used IBM1620 that used core memory. (built circa 1961) The computer occupied a large room and required a serious amount of power to run.

We used to joke that when the computer was turned on the lights in the building would dim.

That computer was a decimal computer (using BCD digits). The op codes were 2 digits. The core memory could hold 20,000 decimal digits.

Definitely magnetic core memory.  When I first graduated (1976), I went to work for a military systems development company.  The US military was in love with magnetic core memory computer systems (both large and small).  I went to one of the manufactures for a training class (operation/maintenance/programming). where we got to get hands on with the core memory.  We actually did some repair work (mostly just soldering the wires to the card edge connectors).

In the systems that we worked with, which were mostly vehicle-based systems, the core memory modules were one of the high failure rate items.  We had a few instances were we needed to extract data from the memory modules (potentially weeks of data collection) much in the same way that you might need to retrieve data from a crashed hard drive.  We would pop open the modules and attach/fix any leads and then attempt to run the system long enough to dump the data on to a magnetic tape drive (or sometimes paper tape).

Gene

Core memory indeed, good to see that it was recognized by so many people, luckily I'm not the only senior in this group.

If I remember correctly, it came from an oscilloscope with a memory function, sort of an early digital scope.

As promised a close-up:

very cool! is each one of the little black hoops a bit?

yes. You flip the magnetism by running a current through the matrix. If I recall well, a read operation is destructive and the bit has to be rewritten after a read.