Synergy User Manual and Tutorial. - THE CORE MEMORY

Synergy User Manual and Tutorial
architecture for computers. Robert Noyce later founded Intel. Jack Kirby had
commented:
"What we didn't realize then was that the integrated circuit would reduce the cost of
electronic functions by a factor of a million to one, nothing had ever done that for
anything before" xxxiii
In 1960, The
Remington Rand
UNIVAC delivered
the Livermore
Advanced Research
Computer (LARC)
computer to the
University of
California Radiation
Laboratory, now
called the Lawrence
Livermore National
Laboratory. This
machine had four
major cabinets that
were approximately
20 feet long, 4 feet
wide and 7 feet tall.
One cabinet contained the I/O processor to route and control input and output, another
had the computational unit to perform computational activity, and the last two contained
16K of ferrite core memory. There were also twelve floating head drums, rotating
cylinders coated with a magnetic material, that were approximately 4 feet wide, 3 feet
deep and 5 feet high, which were used as storage devices. Each drum could store
250,000 12-decimal-digit LARC words—almost 3 Megs on its 12 drums. There were
also two independent controllers for read and write operations. There were also eight
tape head units that could hold approximately 450,000 LARC words on each tape reel,
deducting storage overhead. Its printer could print 600 lines per minute and had a 51
alphanumeric characters set. There was a punch card reader and a control console with
toggle switches to control the system (pictured above). The LARC performed decimal
mode arithmetic operations to 22 decimal digits and could perform 12x12 addition in 4
microseconds and 12x12 multiplication in 12 microseconds, with division taking a little
bit longer. The machine used storage, shift and result registers to store information
during repetitive calculations. LARC’s hardware was difficult to maintain due to its
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