small valves

[Tore S Bekkedal]

On Mon, 2005-05-23 at 00:20 -0700, Tom Jennings wrote:
> Successful commercial core memories require grossly underpaid
> philipino housewives or other exploitable labor; welcome to the
> fruits of capitalism.
> 
> I bought a few hundred thousand new/unused plain cores on ePay a
> few years ago, for about twenty bucks. The problem is they're
> about .005" OD! If you're going to make your own at home without
> slave labor to go blind for you, you'll probably want cores large
> enough to handle.

Actually, I've heard a rumour that IBM in the earliest days used
professional Scandinavian seamstresses to thread their core - But later
they definately used Asian labor until finally the cores became too
small for humans to thread, when they made machines. The machines were
far more expensive than having a human do it - IIRC they had ways of
doing it automatically since the 709 but they were too expensive.

This is from slightly vague memory (nonvolatile my arse), but it's in
"IBM's Early Computers", where there's a whole chapter on it. 

-- 
Tore S Bekkedal <toresbe at ifi.uio.no>