|
I took a course in Fortran back in 1972 and, as part of that, the school took us to the 3M plant in Baltimore where they manufactured big main frames. One of the stops on the tour was this huge open bay room filled with literally hundreds of women who were sewing.
They would take a frame (about the size of a playing card) and thread a needle with wire and run it through the frame and a small iron core in the middle. Then they'd run another wire through and finally a third.
This was one bit. The first wire put the charge on, the second read the charge and the third replicated it so you wouldn't lose memory reading it.
And they'd stack these up to make a hundred bits or a thousand bits depending on how powerful the machine was meant to be.
|