Magnetic bubble memory

Bubble memory is a type of non-volatile computer memory that uses a thin film of a magnetic material to hold small magnetized areas, known as bubbles or domains, each storing one bit of data. The material is arranged to form a series of parallel tracks that the bubbles can move along under the action of an external magnetic field. The bubbles are read by moving them to the edge of the material where they can be read by a conventional magnetic pickup, and then rewritten on the far edge to keep the memory cycling through the material. In operation, bubble memories are similar to delay line memory systems.

Bubble memory started out as a promising technology in the 1980s, offering memory density of a similar order to hard drives but performance more comparable to core memory. This led many to consider it a contender for a "universal memory" that could be used for all storage needs. However, the introduction of dramatically faster semiconductor memory chips pushed bubble into the slow end of the scale, and equally dramatic improvements in hard drive capacity made it uncompetitive in price terms. Bubble memory was used for some time in the 1970s and 80s where its non-moving nature was desirable for maintenance or shock-proofing reasons. The introduction of Flash RAM and similar technologies rendered even this niche uncompetitive, and bubble disappeared entirely by the late 1980s.

Bubble memory is largely the brainchild of a single person, Andrew Bobeck. Bobeck had worked on many kinds of magnetics-related projects through the 1960s, and two of his projects put him in a particularly good position for the development of bubble memory. The first was the development of the first magnetic core memory system driven by a transistor-based controller, and the second was the development of twistor memory.

Twistor is essentially a version of core memory that replaces the "cores" with a piece of magnetic tape. The main advantage of twistor is its ability to be assembled by automated machines, as opposed to core, which was almost entirely manual. AT&T had great hopes for twistor, believing it would greatly reduce the cost of computer memory and put them in an industry leading position. Instead, DRAM memories came onto the market in the early 1970s that rapidly replaced all previous random access memory systems. Twistor ended up being used only in a few applications, many of them AT&T's own computers.

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