RETROCOMPUTING

Retro to the core

Today, computer memory comes buried inside anonymous chips. But there was a time when it was woven with iron and copper.

There are some things that are hard to get your head around unless you can actually see them. Being a computer history fan I’ve often read of core memory but never quite got to grips with how it works. So one day I just thought, ‘the hell with it — I’ll go on eBay and buy some’. Which I did.

According to the seller’s description, the single plane of memory I was sent was taken from a 1960s Soviet Saratov-2 (Саратов-2) minicomputer, a clone of the DEC PDP-8/M. Allegedly, the Soviets nabbed a PDP from a sunken US submarine and the computer was then reverse engineered by the Central Research Institute of Measuring Equipment (ЦНИИИА), in the city of Saratov. I’m taking all this on faith. I haven’t yet found much info online about this machine other than a thread in a Russian-language forum. Chrome has done it’s best to translate this for me, bless, and provided hours of amusement in the process.

The forum also has a number of intriguing images, including this one claiming to be a Saratov-2.