core memory

Core Memory: Why We Used 60-Year-Old Tech in an Arduino Shield

Core Memory: Why We Used 60-Year-Old Tech in an Arduino Shield

Ben North

By Ben North

Ben North

Ben has a background in maths and engineering, with a doctorate in computer vision. He worked for many years in finance. He is now working on Pytch (pytch.org), a system to help young students move from programming in Scratch to programming in Python. He lives in Dublin, Ireland.

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Oliver Nash

By Oliver Nash

Oliver Nash

Oliver is a mathematician by training, with a doctorate in geometry. He spent ten years working in finance, and a few years at a tech startup. These days he’s involved in formalising mathematics with the Mathlib project. He lives in Dublin, Ireland.

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About ten years ago, we designed and made an Arduino shield implementing “core memory,” a technology that was sixty years old even then. Our shield stored 32 individual 1s or 0s using magnetic fields going either clockwise or anticlockwise around 32 tiny doughnuts of magnetisable ‘ferrite’ material. This kind of memory, invented in the 1950s, […]

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