There was a Konami arcade cabinet that (tried to) use bubble memory! It was considered a failure. Also from Wikipedia[0]:
It was considerably more expensive than ROM chip-based boards and extremely sensitive to electromagnetic fields that could render the game unplayable.
You can find the start-up sequence of these on YouTube. It’s pretty…idiosyncratic. It took forever because it had to physically warm the memory up. Though I guess taking forever is irrelevant if you are turning on a machine only once in the morning. In fact, the music in the ROM it plays while starting up was named “Morning Music”.
Amazing. I never realised it got to commercial production, just that
about 1985 it was heralded as the next amazing thing - with however many
libraries of congress per fingernail etc.
with however many libraries of congress per fingernail etc.
That's a bold claim!
I found a NASA document from 1976 that expected bubble memory to reach about a terabit per cubic meter by the year 2000. And then you need over a hundred terabits for a library of congress. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/42884743.pdf
Comments
There was a Konami arcade cabinet that (tried to) use bubble memory! It was considered a failure. Also from Wikipedia[0]:
You can find the start-up sequence of these on YouTube. It’s pretty…idiosyncratic. It took forever because it had to physically warm the memory up. Though I guess taking forever is irrelevant if you are turning on a machine only once in the morning. In fact, the music in the ROM it plays while starting up was named “Morning Music”.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_System
Amazing. I never realised it got to commercial production, just that about 1985 it was heralded as the next amazing thing - with however many libraries of congress per fingernail etc.
That's a bold claim!
I found a NASA document from 1976 that expected bubble memory to reach about a terabit per cubic meter by the year 2000. And then you need over a hundred terabits for a library of congress. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/42884743.pdf