Talk:Bubble memory

untitled
I seem to remember that bubble memory may have been used in some space probes. True? Tempshill 20:51, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

commons stuff
I think some of the stuff from the commons page should be inserted into this page How bubble memory works Math1337 (talk) 01:23, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Computer Memory Type
How do you edit the Computer Memory type table? I am going to add F-RAM onto there. F meaning (ferroelectric).  --Ramu50 (talk) 01:15, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

CCDs
the technology may be dead, but did it spawn Charged coupled devices? formally known as charged bubble devices? Charge-coupled_device - this need to be checked out by a self proclamed expert. mastodon 22:44, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

CCDs and Magnetic Bubbles
Magnetic Bubble Memories competed with CCD memories but did not spawn them. Both are serial-access (vs. Random-Access) memory approaches, but CCDs were silicon-based, like RAMs, whereas Magnetic Bubbles used an entirely different class of materials such as magnetic garnets. Both approaches lost out to the much more entrenched and well-supported RAM technology. But CCDs went on to have tremendous success in digital cameras. User:DrBubble

Magnetic Bubbles in Space?
In 1971 IBM delivered a small magnetic bubble memory chip to NASA as a prototype replacement for space-borne tape recorders, but it never went into space and I'm not aware of any bubble memories that did.--DrBubble 04:59, 2 August 2006 (UTC)DrBubble

Possible Error
In the article, it said that Konami's Bubble System is Z80 based. If I'm not mistaken, the board used a Motorola 68000 and used the Z80 as a sound controller. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 66.41.51.46 (talk) 14:41, 20 March 2007 (UTC).

Old image
The image removed before (09:09, 2 June 2006 OrphanBot (Talk | contribs) (Removing image with no source information. Such images that are older than seven days may be deleted at any time.)) is from my website: and can be used without restriction. I think it is better than the current image.

The image appears also at (without permission, btw).



Illustrations available to explain how bubble memory works
Hi, I'm Peo from danish Wikipedia. I have just uploaded a series of computer rendered images to Commons which explain in detail how bubble memory works. Check it out here. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.255.89.142 (talk) 00:10, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Connexions to CCD:s
This article is too market-"failure" oriented! I've gotten the impression that it was partially (at the least) a research base for the further devl of CCD-chips, which emotionally instead would make Bubble memory a great success!!! (note my very-very emotional exclamation marks, also note the bold text). Market is just the surface of the western world.

Now to be a little more neutrally minded: the article concentrates too much on Bobeck himself, and too little on the influence of Bobeck on his colleagues, too little on the local culture of inventions that emerged around Bobeck and colleagues at Bell Labs. This local culture makes Bubble memory a major research acheivement, and an inspiration source for at least CCD:s possibly more.  Said: Rursus   ☻   10:34, 5 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Curious... I'd be interested to see how you're relating a technology that moves magnetic domains along a strip of tape to one that measures the collected charges on a photon-charged capacitor matrix... any more than, say, to an active-scanned LCD, photistor grid, or even a high end keyboard... 193.63.174.11 (talk) 10:50, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

Article problems
This article is interesting, noteworthy, and full of great links, but it's not very encyclopedic at the moment. There are no inline citations (just links) and it reads a bit too much like a story. I added a template for being unreferenced, but not for being a story as its topic may be inherently a history, so a time-line in prose may actually be best? &mdash;Joel D. Reid (talk) 17:18, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
 * I see your point. I think the "story" of the history of bubble memory is something that is interesting and adds to the article.  It might be better, however, to split off some of the subject matter in the  history and incorporate that into a new section on how the memory works, which the current article is lacking.  --mikeu talk 01:54, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

Irrelevant added material
there is a whole section on micro fluidic bubbles as memory. yes it does contain the word "bubble". But this is about magnetic bubbles not bubbles in fluids. THe section should be deleted in it's entirety. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.254.151.139 (talk) 12:08, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Well, that content was added in February 2007, so there is a precedent for including it. As almost the only part of the article backed up by a reliable independent source, it has more credibility than much of the text. Is it really irrelevant? If someone wanted to find information about fluidic bubbles as memory, a page titled Bubble memory is exactly where they would be most likely to look. Alzarian16 (talk) 15:14, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

How fast / slow?
Mention is made that Bubble Memory was being considered as a near-universal memory device that could service "all but the high performance" sectors of the market. Presumably something which has its contents endlessly cycling in a 64-bit long, 64-bit wide loop would have some kind of performance penalty, especially if you're hunting for a randomised sequence of single bytes or words. But its compact packaging et al would have made it cheaper and possibly faster than basic-design core... and certainly it was good enough for cheap, slow micros (I remember it being mentioned quite a lot in 1980s children's books about computers)...

Thing is, there's no mention whatsoever on here of how fast it actually was - raw serial transfer rate, random seek/worst case latency, etc, potential longevity, all that. What would have been its actual performance ceiling, what would it ultimately have been suitable for, did it even have a chance of being competitive with DRAM? No data... can we get hold of that? 193.63.174.10 (talk) 15:05, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

(Particularly as, the very brief research I've done both off in-article links and by googling suggests a typical kind of speed (an Intel 7110, 1-mbit part) of ~12kbyte/sec and a 40 millisecond access time... which considering the 128kbyte storage doesn't even make it massively competitive with floppy disks (say, an 8kb/s transfer and 200ms random access), unless the individual modules were cheap enough to make buying, say, 2mb of bubble memory cheaper than a basic 5.25" floppy drive and a box of 10x 180kb (easily reformattable to 200k+) disks. Certainly, it'd be pretty bad for main RAM, even with 8 of them being used in a parallel access mode you'd just about satisfy the demands of a 1mhz 8-bit CPU with inefficient microcode (doing one 1-byte fetch/write every 10 cycles) IF it was buffered with a small FIFO. There was another, faster prototype mentioned as having more like an 8 millisecond access time, and a 312.5khz master clock (I'm not entirely sure how these numbers relate to each other - 8us = 125khz, or 2.5x less (0.4x the master) - acceptable for CPU multipliers, but wierd when counting bits) but with no raw transfer speed or easy way of calculating it. Even that, however, despite being pretty good for backing store at the time or even (if we assume you could stream maybe 625kb/s out of it on a 16-bit bus) into the mid 90s, isn't so great as a "memory" device... for any machine running more than 1mhz, DRAM (with access times in the 150-200 nanosecond range) would have walked all over it, and SRAM (sub-100ns) more so. Was faster, lower latency bubble memory available at all? And just how much DID it cost? Say, vs 1/2mb of DRAM costing a few hundred dollars in the early-mid 80s?) 193.63.174.10 (talk) 15:31, 16 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Iirc, they were made to take the rads. Sandia process rad-hard semiconductor RAM and ROM/PROM/EPROM came in the mid 80's.  Prior to and for some time after initially, viable options for rad hard were core ropes or bubble.  The speed you mention wasn't too bad for the day, for esoteric storage. 2603:300B:132B:6000:319A:38D7:FA5A:9051 (talk) 13:54, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

Popular culture
It could be interesting to add a section on depictions of bubble memory in popular culture. If memory serves, quite a number of Marvel Comics stories mention computers specifically having bubble memory (although the characteristics of these devices would usually have very little in common with their real world namesakes); probably a consequence of the hype getting through to writers, but not the subsequent drop in interest. 130.239.235.12 (talk) 18:00, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

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ICBMs, RVs, Sats, reactors...
What about the use of Bubble memory in high ionizing radiation environments to replace core ropes? 2603:300B:132B:6000:319A:38D7:FA5A:9051 (talk) 13:44, 8 April 2024 (UTC)