Carry out the necessary research and write an essay on the history of the development of computer memory systems (e.g., CRT memory, delay?line stores, ferrite core stores, etc.)

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

This is an open?ended question. Some professors might require a short note highlighting the details and others may require an extended essay covering memory technologies and the biographies of those involved. Historically, the first form of computer memory was the punched card. This was used in the Jacquard loom in 1801 to control the weaving of patterns in textiles – a hole or no hole at a point in a card could be used to cause the horizontal thread to go in front of or behind the vertical threads. Babbage proposed the punched card as a storage mechanism in his analytical engine.

Early EDVAC and ACE computers used mercury delay lines to store data. Information was converted into pulses in columns of mercury and the pulses were continually recirculated. Mercury delay lines are impractical because you have to wait for the data you want to reach the end of the tube where it is read and recirculated.

One of the very first random access fully electronic storage devices was the Williams tube that stored data as an electrostatic charge on the surface of a cathode ray tube. These had small storage capacities but they made possible some of the first computers at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s.

Drum memories appeared in the late 1940s. These used a drum or cylinder as a magnetic recording device; that is, it was rather like a 3?dimensional hard disk (instead of coating a flat platter with a magnetic material, the surface of a rotating drum was coated with a magnetic material). Data was written along tracks and the disk rotated. This was also a non?random access device, but it could store more data than previous technologies.

Jay Foster investigated the properties of ferromagnetic materials at MIT in 1949 and this work led to the development of the ferrite core memory used by the Whirlwind I computer in 1953. The ferrite core stored binary data as clockwise or anticlockwise magnetization in a tiny ferrite bead. This allowed random access and relatively high speeds (e.g., 1 ?s). Ferrite core memory dominated computing for three decades.

Today’s mainstream semiconductor memory is constructed with DRAM, dynamic memory that stores data as an electrostatic charge in a transistor. DRAM was first commercially produced by Intel in 1970. It is still the dominant form of main store in computers today.

Secondary storage has been implemented as paper tape (obsolete) magnetic tape (still going strong in its modern forms), and disk drives. Magnetic tape recording was invented in Germany in 1928. The first use of tape to record data was in 1951 on the UNIVAC I.

The disk drive uses a flat rotating platter with data recorded in concentric tracks on a magnetized surface. It is the same as tape in principle. The first disk drive was introduced by IBM in 1956 in their RAMAC computer. The first relatively low?cost hard disk drive appeared in 1973 as the IBM 3340 Winchester drive. Today, the hard disk drive has evolved into small, low?cost systems with capacities of the order of 3 TB.

The disk drive uses a flat rotating platter with data recorded in concentric tracks on a magnetized surface. It is the same as tape in principle. The first disk drive was introduced by IBM in 1956 in their RAMAC computer. The first relatively low?cost hard disk drive appeared in 1973 as the IBM 3340 Winchester drive. Today, the hard disk drive has evolved into small, low?cost systems with capacities of the order of 3 TB.