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[-SD-]

Dr. Bernard Widrow tells the story of the first RAM chip that he and his MIT colleagues developed in the early 1950s.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9e2SL56FSAw&hd=1

Truly groundbreaking stuff. Got adopted by IBM and the rest is history - gaming history - as far as we here at GAF are concerned.

 

[maquiladora]

That was great. Amazing how far we've come within that guys lifetime.

 

[Tomat]

That abomination is a piece of RAM? 4KBs at that. That's incredible.

 

[KingItachi]

It is a great watch OP thanks for the link.

 

[DreadPirateRoberts]

That's not how i pictured the first ram module at all.

 

[-SD-]

That abomination is a piece of RAM? 4KBs at that. That's incredible.

The first transistor was also ginormous: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Replica-of-first-transistor.jpg

Go ahead, build a 1.4 billion transistor Intel Core i7-3770K chip out of these

 

[BurnOutBrighter]

This is incredible and fascinating, but I couldn't help but notice a dildo-shaped object at 5:09. Damn internets. They've corrupted me.

 

[ASTROID2]

Pretty cool. It's amazing how small those are now.

 

[Rubius]

"If you wish to play Crysis 3, you must first invent the RAM." WOOP
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc

 

[Bonton]

That abomination is a piece of RAM? 4KBs at that. That's incredible.

He said 4096 bits, thats 512 Byte = 0.5 KB or 4Kb, but not 4KB

 

[Tagg9]

Cool video, thanks.

 

[fallagin]

"Whats the hurry why do you gotta go so fast?" :lol

 

[Smiles and Cries]

he sounded so sad at the part IBM came in and took his work

 

[nismogrendel]

that was awesome

 

[deviljho]

"There, it took up a whole half of a building. The other half of the building was the air conditioning."

=D

 

[Palette Swap]

Fantastic. Thanks for sharing this, it gave me an engineering boner.

 

[Dreamwriter]

That's pretty cool how that works - each RAM plane represents one bit that can be read or written to at a time, and stores 4096 bits, so if you want to read an 8-bit number all at once, you take a stack of 8 of those RAM planes, and then you have 4096 bytes of storage. If you want more storage, you have to increase the size of each plane so you can increase the number of wires in the weave.

 

[Tomat]

He said 4096 bits, thats 512 Byte = 0.5 KB or 4Kb, but not 4KB

Haha, woops.

I call it an abomination because that is not something I'd look at and thing "Yeah that's RAM." The fact that it works as RAM is really damn cool. I just finished an Assembly/Computer Architecture course this semester so its interesting to see what the old stuff actually looks like and how it works.