Imagesource: https://spectrum.ieee.org/

32 GigaByte RAM in one of the modern machines on which we push pixels back and forth today, is neither a rarity nor really expensive.

If you compare that with the at the time luxurious 4 kilobytes of the Apple-1 mentioned above, which could be expanded to a monstrous 8 kB, we're talking about 4,194,304 times as much RAM in just 46 years. 💥

But before RAM was available in little plastic boxes with metal legs, a completely different technology was used to store individual bits: Ferrite cores. 🧲

For example, the 4 kB of RAM on the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC) was made of many small, hand-wired ferrite cores. 👩‍🚀Today as unthinkable as unnecessary, but the physical principle behind the idea is quite interesting.

Andy Geppert already picked up the idea in 2020, and delivered an exciting DIY ferrite core with Core64 at the time.

Steven Cass just recently took a closer look at the project, and neatly documented it for spectrum.ieee.org here.

The project is interesting as a stand-alone. But the integration options make it even more exciting. Fancy some 60s tech and a suitable tinkering project?

Here you go.