Bubble memory devices

[Dave McGuire]

On Feb 18, 2008, at 5:52 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
>> What happened to bubble memory? Did it die out due to the costs, or
>> did people prefer to use cassettes, disks etc. instead?
>
> I think it p[retty much died out due to cost and limited capacity.  
> IIRC,
> that Intel chipset was 1Mbit, or 128K bytes. And it was hardly cheap.
> Bubble memory did get used in some portables, for example, since  
> with no
> moving parts it's pretty rugged.
>
> HP sold a bubble memory board for the HP9000/200 machines. It's pretty
> much the Intel chipset along with the standard HP DIO slot interface
> (address decoder, card ID regiter). It's used a 128K mass storage  
> 'disk'
> by the HP9000. There's some information, including a photo of the  
> board,
> over on http://www.hpmuseum.net.

   I've always been a fan of bubble memory, although I have no  
functional bubble subsystems here.  I've seen S-100 and Q-bus bubble  
memory boards (the latter I missed on eBay by a few dollars maybe a  
year ago), and there's at least one piece of test equipment made by  
Fluke (I don't recall which one) that uses bubble memory cartridges.   
I also have some brand new Sharp CE-100B cartridges, but no machine  
to use them in.

            -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL