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  • hand weaving thousands of tiny cores is the part i cant get over. my dad had a bead loom kit for making belts and i could never keep the pattern straight, gave up after twenty rows or so. were boards like this still assembled by hand in 1980, or did they have machines doing it by then?
    by songhonglei1985
  • Space. Space. Wanna go to space.
    by liminal-dev
  • Built by highly skilled humans.
    by annoyingnoob
  • I saw this in person and then again on Dr Stone
    by galvanust
  • Funny to see that frontpage as earlier on today I made a comment saying that with LLMs I'm betting we'll see N-modular redundancy systems soon, with a ultra-hardened, minimal, part picking the majority votes of N LLM-written implementations (in different languages, on different stacks, all running at the same time). Not 100% TFA but "computing in space" involved a lot of N-modular redundancy systems.

    The reason I'm 99.9% sure we'll see that is that it'll help catch both bugs in the LLMs implementations themselves (and we know there are plenty of those) but also in the stacks/platforms/VMs running those software.

    Imagine one spec and five implementations (Rust, Go, Java, Python, whatever) and one minimal system, with the tiniest of the tiniest attack surface, returning the answer as soon as 3-of-5 agree. And, as a bonus, if later on one the two "missing" answer arrives and doesn't match, it's cause for enquiry and bugs be smashed.

    Basically (and although I don't care about Ethereum or cryptocurrencies except for the cryptographic aspect), we already witnessed that: 3 different implementations of Ethereum and, in the early days, one of the implementation whose result differed from the two others. And hence the implementation not respecting the spec (in that case it was the only one that was faulty) got instantly detected (and promptly patched). My memory is fuzzy but I know this happened.

    Heck, I may write a proof-of-concept for fun.

    I've got other ideas as to what will be possible in the future but I'm keeping them for another day.

    by TacticalCoder
  • The architecture without inhibit lines is interesting. Did this make the memory faster, or was the main goal simply to reduce the number of sense amplifiers and simplify the board layout?
    by imnotr0b0t
  • Amazing how reliable core memory was for critical systems, even in space. Bet it weighed a ton compared to modern RAM.
    by lampcord
  • Author here for all your core memory questions...
    by kens

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