Ferrite memory

The ferrite memory is one of the first primary memory types. Creating a fast electronic memory was a big problem of the first computer manufacturers. One of possible solutions was to use this technology. Each bit of the memory uses its own tiny ferrite core. The ferrite is a magnetically active ceramics material. The magnetic polarity of the core determines the stored information. Two or three wires were conducted through the core and provided read and write. The memory shown has 45 kbit capacity, so it contains 45 000 ferrite cores. The wires had to be woven through the cores by hand, this job was supposedly done by prisoners. An EC1033 mainframe computer used a Polish ferrite memory with 512 kB capacity. It consisted of several boards, each of them contained approx. 130 000 cores on a wire with 0,08 mm diameter. The memory needed very complicated driving electronics.