Thanks For the Memories: Touring the Awesome Random Access of Old (hackaday.com)

szczys writes: The RAM we use today is truly amazing in all respects: performance, reliability, price; all have been optimized to the point you can consider memory a solved problem. Equally fascinating is the meandering path that we've taken over the last half century to get here. Drums, tubes, mercury delay lines, dekatrons, and core memory. They're still as interesting as the day electrons first ran through their circuits. Perhaps most amazing is the cost and complexity, both of which make you wonder how they ever manage to be used in production machines. But here's the clincher: despite being difficult and costly to manufacture, they were all very reliable.

Comments

Uhh whaaaa?

[Dunbal]

But here's the clincher: despite being difficult and costly to manufacture, they were all very reliable.

That was kind of built into the design spec. The guy who build unreliable memory (you know, the one who came up with the Alzheimer Machine) - well he went bankrupt pretty quick right alongside the guy who invented a horseless carriage that only needed a horse half the time.