Bubble memory is a kind of non-risky pc memory that uses a thin movie of a magnetic materials to hold small magnetized areas, referred to as bubbles or domains, every storing one bit of information. The material is arranged to form a sequence of parallel tracks that the bubbles can transfer along under the motion of an external magnetic area. The bubbles are read by moving them to the edge of the material, where they are often learn by a conventional magnetic pickup, and then rewritten on the far edge to maintain the memory cycling through the fabric. In operation, bubble recollections are much like delay-line Memory Wave Program techniques. Bubble memory began out as a promising know-how within the 1970s, providing efficiency similar to core memory, memory density similar to laborious drives, and no moving components. This led many to contemplate it a contender for a "common memory" that could possibly be used for all storage wants.

The introduction of dramatically sooner semiconductor memory chips within the early 1970s pushed bubble into the sluggish end of the scale and it started to be thought-about largely as a substitute for disks. The equally dramatic enhancements in onerous-drive capability by way of the early 1980s made it uncompetitive in price terms for mass storage. Bubble memory was used for some time within the 1970s and 1980s in functions the place its non-shifting nature was fascinating for maintenance or shock-proofing reasons. Bubble memory is largely the brainchild of a single individual, Andrew Bobeck. Bobeck had worked on many sorts of magnetics-related projects by means of the 1960s, and two of his projects put him in a particularly good place for the event of bubble memory. The first was the development of the first magnetic-core memory system driven by a transistor-primarily based controller, and the second was the development of twistor memory. Twistor is actually a version of core memory that replaces the "cores" with a piece of magnetic tape.

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The main advantage of twistor is its capability to be assembled by automated machines, versus core, which was almost solely manual. AT&T had great hopes for twistor, believing that it might tremendously scale back the price of computer memory and put them in an business leading place. Instead, DRAM memories came onto the market within the early 1970s and rapidly changed all earlier random-entry memory methods. Twistor ended up being used solely in just a few applications, a lot of them AT&T's own computer systems. One attention-grabbing facet impact of the twistor idea was noticed in manufacturing: underneath certain circumstances, passing a current via one of many electrical wires operating contained in the tape would cause the magnetic fields on the tape to move within the path of the present. If used correctly, it allowed the stored bits to be pushed down the tape and pop off the top, forming a sort of delay-line memory, but one the place the propagation of the fields was underneath computer management, as opposed to automatically advancing at a set rate defined by the materials used.

Nevertheless, such a system had few advantages over twistor, particularly because it did not allow random entry. In 1967, Bobeck joined a crew at Bell Labs and started work on enhancing twistor. The memory density of twistor was a operate of the scale of the wires

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Pub: 13 Sep 2025 05:48 UTC

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