Why Memories?

part 1

• vacuum tubes
• mercury delay lines
• Williams tubes and other electrostatic memories
• magnetic cores

Now more or less standardized into three major kinds:

• slow, cheap, long-term (disks; tapes and other archival media)
• faster, more expensive storage, lost when power goes off, called dynamic RAM or DRAM, "main memory" of the computer
• faster, more expensive storage closer to processing speed: static RAM, or SRAM

Memories are Made of This 17:30 Thurs 12 September 1996 SHB5, Senate House, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa