by Jo Brodie, Queen Mary University of London
We have explained how core rope memory was used as the computer memory storing the Apollo guidance computer program that got us to the moon. A team from the University of Washington came up with a fun craft activity to make your own core memory. It may not fly you to the moon, but is a neat way to store information in a bracelet. Find their activity pages here [EXTERNAL].
What it involves is threading 8 beads onto a string, with a gap between them to form a storage space for bytes of data. Each byte is 8 binary bits (Eight pieces of information, each a 1 or a 0). Each bead represents the position of one bit in your core rope memory. You then take other threads and weave them through the beads. Each thread will store another byte of actual data. Pass the thread through a bead when you want that bead to read 1, or over, when you want that bead to read 0.
Each thread weaving past or through 8 beads can then encode the information for one letter. By adding lots of threads you can store a word or even a sentence on each core rope memory string (perhaps your name, or some secret message).
Using a binary encoding for each letter (so capital letter A would be the 8 bits 01000001 if you’re following this conversion from binary to letters table) you put that letter’s thread through or over each of the 8 beads to ‘spell’ out the letter in binary.
My name is Jo so a core rope memory encoding my name would have only three threads (one to hold the 8 beads and two to spell my name). The second thread would go over, through, over, over, through, over, through, over to spell the capital letter J (01001010). The second thread would go over, through, through, over, through, through, through, through to spell lowercase o (01101111).
Let’s hope you have a slightly longer name so can have more fun time creating your own personalised core rope memory!
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This article was funded by UKRI, through Professor Ursula Martin’s grant EP/K040251/2 and grant EP/W033615/1.
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