For Sale: Soviet Military Ferrite Core Memory Stack Cube and Manual | Hacker News Reader

For Sale: Soviet Military Ferrite Core Memory Stack Cube and Manual

ebay.com

154 pointsjoshwa101 comments

Nothing next to this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/1967-vintage-London-MELLOTRON-Progra...

My birthday is soon. Email in profile.

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?

Could it be to filter out the 50Hz mains interference?

The whole point of broadcast TV operating at mains frequency is because it makes interference less noticeable, accdording to sources like [1].

[1] http://www.adelia.co.uk/frame-rates-ntsc-pal/

Wow, what a find. A tape based sampler. Amazing. That would be so much fun to restore to working condition.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mellotron

And the Strawberry Fields flute sound!

Also the strings in Spaceboy from Siamese Dream, for all you other 35 year olds out there...

37 but excellent guess.

I was referring to myself, but respect mon.

And Led Zep's Rain Song.

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.

Watch this documentary on history of synth[1] -- Chris is in it...

My favorite though, is Skinny Puppy.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXm8O5cKrhI

thanks! watching the whole thing.

>seamless shuffle (!!!)

In a few years, when I inevitably get bored of melody and back into brain-melting glitch music, this is what I'm doing.

You might wanna check out Autechre's side project Gescom, specifically the 'MiniDisc' album: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minidisc_%28Gescom_minidisc%29

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 :-).

For the money, I'd prefer a Curta calculator:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curta

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1311.R...

the search in Russian for "Блок памяти БП-20" leads to this

http://www.ngpedia.ru/cgi-bin/getpage.exe?cn=61&uid=0.381138...

which points to "АСВТ-М" series of machines used in all areas of economics, government, education, and military as well.

http://www.icfcst.kiev.ua/MUSEUM/PHOTOS/M-6000_r.html

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 :

http://sovietsouvenirs.com/catalog/images/ic/core_memory-15-...

That's 4K words; each word seems to be 18 bits (assuming that's what "width" means). That's 9 kB by today's standards.

Actually traditionally it's 9 KB, or 9 KiB if you're into the modern binary prefixes.

9 kB would be 9,000 bytes, but this seems to be (4,096 * 18) / 8 = 9,216 bytes, which is exactly 9 KB.

Or maybe I'm just a hopeless old f*rt for caring about things like this, and the world needs to get off my lawn.

I obsess over these pedantic differences too and I'm <30 so don't feel too bad. repeatedly pitches 3.5" floppies onto your lawn

NERD SHAME EDIT: It's been a while... 3.5"

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.

I was fortunate enough to stop using them long before it bothered me, but now it does!

> 1000 x 1024 x 1440

I think you accidentally included a "1000 x".

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.

3.25"... is that a Russian format?

It's not exactly the most common but it exists and no, it's not Russian:

http://www.retrotechnology.com/herbs_stuff/325_inch.jpg

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.

There is some chance the 9th bit in each half-word was for parity.

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.

Someone please buy this and loan it out to the Computer History Museum!

These aren't that rare. You can buy yourself a single board for significantly less:

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_sacat=0&_from=R40&_nkw=ferri...

Is it just me or is that "art". Nice design.

Weren't the Russians making vacuum tubes for decades after the US stopped and "perfected" them?

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:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-25

As well as the audiophile-pleasing sound on those planes.

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.

>Truly an aircraft for those with a discerning palette.

or a lifesaver for aircrews stationed in "dry" countries like Yemen :)

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).

How many collectable watches are available vs antique Soviet memory modules?

How many collectors of watches are in the market vs those looking for antique Soviet memory modules?

Not sure about vacuum tubes, but Nixie tubes were used until the 90s. Most vintage Nixie tubes are from the former Soviet Union.

Yeah, that design makes it a complete fetish item. I covet it just by looking at it.

Those presumably hand soldered enamel wires cleanly laid out? I'm melting like leaded solder on a hot plate.

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.

It's kinda awesome, that the literal title of the manual is "Exploitation manual" :)

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).

That's crazy, you can see it's handmade. I wonder if it still works?

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.

Might be fun to hook it up to an Arduino and see if you could read/write. I imagine it needs its own power supply.

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."

Ref: http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/conspiracy/q0258a.shtml

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)?!

And imagine teenagers ended up acquiring it, and getting access to those launch codes! cue Hollywood movie scenario

Only to discover that the code to launch the missiles at the Soviets was set to 00000000

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_Action_Link

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.

Iron core memory, so it would probably still read/write just fine, if not, fixing it shouldn't be too hard if you've got the hands for it.

Reminds me of this core memory shield that was developed for the Arduino: http://www.corememoryshield.com/

Ampex made core memory as recently as the 1990s. And yes, they were hand-made.

It's USSR area hardware. Odds are it runs even if you put it on fire.

Brings back memories.

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.)

So this thing runs in space? They went to space with this?

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 suspect it is more likely to be from terrestrial military hardware or a something like an http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ES_EVM

I know of someone who has a piece of EDSAC (or maybe EDSAC 2) on his shelf. It looks very similar to:

http://www.chezfred.org.uk/University/ComputerXHistory/First...

He happened to be in the vicinity as it was being decommissioned. It's sometimes used as a doorstop.

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?

Reminds me of a project of a friend (which I submitted a while ago): Magnetic core memory using Arduino

http://www.corememoryshield.com/

previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3888926

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...

Mine wasn't; after a while every time I set it down, little broken cores would rain down. They apparently decay over time.

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.

Reminds me of this video of Adam Savage showing off his byte: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQWcIkoqXwg

Page archive for future reference — http://archive.is/fj080

I wouldn't be surprised if Newark/Arrow/Avnet are still stocking these.

4096 words @ 400kHz

Logical "1" - 20-60mV Logical "0" - 10mV (not more)

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".

There's a "Make Offer" button. And Buy It Now stuff is really common on eBay these days. Surely "the point of eBay" is whatever people do with it?

The $2k is just a price cap, you can still bid on it.

I'm wondering if it still contains data, if it's working.

This is a very cool find. Thanks for sharing.

Absolutely overpriced.

Overpriced in terms of today's RAM prices (yes!), or overpriced for a Soviet 4K RAM module of its type? I've never seen one before so I have no idea.

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!

If you consider inflation and, more importantly, rarity, I think it's not that overpriced.

A 1914 D wheat penny was worth, you guessed it, US $0.01 in 1914, but that doesn't mean the current going price of around $3,500 is overpriced.

Let me just call my Soviet era RAM module guy.

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.

There's a guy on Youtube who buys stuff like this and takes it apart to see what weird stuff they did: http://www.youtube.com/user/mikeselectricstuff

I guarantee you that this assembly did not cost the local equivalent of $50 originally.

Maybe in raw materials. ;)

beautiful!

Seems like the kind of thing that you'd keep in your attic forever.

True, I've got a 4k x 12bit core store in mine, and it's been there over 30 years :-)

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