Puzzler...

An eon or so ago, I posted a puzzler that asked what business Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) got into that bankrupted him. Half the people responding (that would be two people) got the right answer: a typesetting machine. More specifically, his investments in the Paige Compositor (more here) did him in financially.

This week's puzzler delves into the history of digital computing, specifically into the history of a computer's “main memory” (today known as RAM, for Randomly Accessible Memory). In the early days of digital computers, main memory was one of the biggest engineering challenges. There were no integrated circuits at all, much less the massive RAM chips we have today. Magnetic core memory was the mainstay of main memory for a couple of decades – but before core memory, there were other technologies used. For example, magnetic drum memory was used into the mid-1960s on some computers. Some of these earlier technologies seem quite exotic and bizarre by today's standards, far more complicated and less capable than seem normal today.

One of these technologies was still in use (albeit not commonly) in the U.S. Navy when I went through computer technician school in the early 1970s. Even then it seemed like a museum refugee! But I was trained to repair and maintain this main memory, though thankfully I never saw one once I left school. Today's puzzler is this: what chemical element did a once-popular main memory technology depend on?

We Won!

Last Sunday we took a lovely day trip, driving up the back roads through the coastal mountains and high desert to Mt. San Jacinto. Along the way, in Mountain Center (not far from Idyllwild) we stopped at an animal sanctuary we've visited many times before: Living Free. It's a "no kill" shelter that does a particularly nice job with its three catterys, and we stop there to immerse ourselves in felines for an hour or so. We didn't know they had a fund-raiser going on, but they did -- so we contributed a little, and got a couple of raffle tickets in return. I can't imagine how many of these raffle tickets we've "purchased" in the past, but the number is a large one. We've never won anything before.

But this time, we won the first place drawing. If you know us at all, you will understand our amusement when we heard what the prize was: a small collection of Ken Norton memorobilia. Of course my first question was "Who the heck is Ken Norton?" I'd never heard of him. It turns out he is a world champion boxer, apparently most famous for having beaten Muhammed Ali. We have won a pair of his boxing gloves (don't know if they're used or not), an official Ken Norton coffee cup, and some kind of signed Ken Norton letter.

Anybody know something good we could do with this stuff?