Identifying a ferrite core board.

[HMV 1120]

Is anybody able to identify the following board? It consists of a stack of two core planes and great strips of diodes. The eight transisters present are motorola devices marked SM2824. The board itself is stamped "E2000 Memory", "52 by 52" (52 by 52 cores?) and is dated "? 18 1969".

All the component pieces have SM prefix part numbers. The only sign of a company logo is a stylised "BN" on the PCB. The edge connector is 32 + 32.

It's about time I gave my tired desktop a RAM upgrade...

Robs

[AVOmeter]

what you have there is most likely to be a magnetic core memory chip with 2 layers of wire grids with ferrite beads threadded onto them in a specific pattern, each ferrite bead represents one bit of information and the cores can be magnetized in two different ways (clockwise or counterclockwise) and the bit is stored in a core as zero or one depending on that core's magnetization direction.


hope this helps with the identification


Stephen

[woodchips]

Hi, looks very similar to an old accounting computer I bought decades ago, made by Friden and used a electric typewriter as the input/output. Wished I hadn't scrapped it now, but was rather large and heavy. The boards were about 10" by 8". The core store was the working memory for the whole machine. Bob

[Kat Manton]

Burroughs?

Wikipedia - Burroughs:

A revolutionary adding machine was the Sensimatic, which was able to perform many business functions semi-automatically. [...] The Sensimatic developed into the Sensitronic which could store balances on a magnetic stripe which was part of the ledger card. [...] The Sensitronic was followed by the E1000, the E2000, E4000, E6000 and the E8000, which was computer system supporting magnetic tape, card reader/punches and a line printer.

Kat

[Herald1360]

Originally Posted by HMV 1120

The only sign of a company logo is a stylised "BN" on the PCB.

Not really relevant but if that logo were really DN it would be Dynamit Nobel a manufacturer of the basic PCB substrate material.

[HMV 1120]

Many thanks to you all so far,

I have so far been unable to find any technical information (or even a date) on the Burroughs E2000 machine. I haver however come across the following brochure for the E1400 (1966) HERE. A US origin seems likely as most of the discreet components are from US manufacturers.

Robs

[Herald1360]

Where did the more obvious components originate?

[HMV 1120]

Motorola, Sprague and G.E. (General Electric?), as well as "Trimit"for some variable resistors. On closer inspection (via a hand lens!), a faint quality control stamp is visible on the back with a "B" marking identical to the capital B used in the Burroughs logo.

Robs

[DNaegle]

I have the exact same board. As near as I can tell, it's from a Burroughs E2000 machine, which was from CA 1969. I was looking for further information when I found your post.

[ricard]

I used to have (maybe still do) some boards for a later Burroghs machine, E8000 or something like that. Interestingly, virtually all TTL chips had Burroughs type numbers on them (in the form nnnn-nnnn, like (fictuous example) 6356-3002). The seemed to be for the most part anyway standard TTL chips when looking at the schematics.

HMV 1120: That really is a wonderful sales brochure. How [computing] times have changed...

[Herald1360]

Not just computing..... there are some interesting period stereotypes in the pictures! "Your operator" for example.