Memory Net Resources

These references are mostly for historical interest and indicate how much the world has changed since 1996. Even the list of search engines is obsolete. Guess which one is missing. Use it to find any materials for which links are now dead.

Meanwhile, why not see what you can find, using a search engine, such as AltaVista, Lycos or Yahoo?

General History

Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) has a maililng list "Community Memory -- Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace". See the web archive site for past discussion and how to sign up.

Here's a place to look at some history. There are some typos, and the coverage is pretty general -- not just memory.

John von Neumann, credited with much of the basic design of present computers, had an interesting life.

Here's a retrospective on the early days of UNIVAC, a leading pioneer in business computing. There's a nice summary of some of the earlier memory technologies in the article. The UNIVAC Solid State Computer, Unisys History Newsletter, vol. 1, no. 2, December 1992.

Manchester University has a virtual museum of their contribution to computer technology.

Not to be outdone, so does University of Pennsylvania, where ENIAC, widely considered to be the first electronic digital computer, was constructed.

The AltaVista search engine includes a history archive, for example, here's a snippet on the British Colossus project (a code-breaking machine built in 1943, fully operational in 1994, 10 built by the end of World War 2, kept a closely guarded secret until 1970).

Specific Memory Technologies

There's some information about Williams Tubes at Manchester University, one of the early pioneering sites of computer development. Also, there are some pictures of real Williams Tubes at the same site.

Look here for some history of the transistor.

Visit Micron's history of semiconductor memory, for some dates and technologies.

Future Trends

In the not too distant future, DRAM will increasingly play the role that disk does -- and already does in some high-end systems. Here for example is some history of a specific company that announced a DRAM-based "disk" in 1995, with a transfer rate of 20Mbyte/s and access time as low as 0.035ms -- nearly 300 times faster than a typical disk.

NASA has published an article indicating that if current trends continue, DRAM will be as cheap as disk per byte around the year 2000; my own calculation puts the crossover point about 5 years later. (The long term trend is a 4-times reduction in memory cost every 3 years, whereas disk cost halves in the same period.) Given that DRAM is more expensive to package than disk (among other things, it needs a highly reliable power supply, since it loses data when turned off), I expect disk to persist to at least 2010 as a low-cost form of storage despite the lower theoretical cost per bit of disk predicted for the early part of the 21st century. But given that DRAM is about 200,000 times faster than disk, more and more applications will cease to use disk as the prices converge. Already some high-end databases are purely DRAM-based.

Miscellaneous Resources

In 1994, a Colossus machine was built, as near as possible to the original specification. Here is some PR on the event.

Find out about how to choose between different kinds of RAM in the modern world.