On Friday, 9 December 2022 10:34:00 GMT I wrote: > in the 1970s the national grid was monitored and analysed with a Ferranti > Argus 500 machine with 24KB RAM and a 2MB disk. It was common for > American visitors to believe that was just driving the control engineers' > displays, and where was the main computer?
Er... There was no RAM in those days, not of the type we know today. In fact it was 2-microsecond core store. Each tiny ferromagnetic toroid was threaded with one X wire, one Y wire and (I think it was) a sync pulse wire. A remarkable labour of love to build such a thing. -- Regards, Peter.
