The Electronics Weekly edition of January 26th 1972 reads: ‘Philips Research Laboratories, Eindhoven are investigating the possible use of magnetic bubbles as information carriers’.
‘In recent years, the possibility of bubbles being made to move along well-defined paths in a thin plate of monocrystalline ferromagnetic garnet has aroused considerable interest’, continued the article, ‘bubbles may be applied, for example, in new kinds of mass memories.’
The ‘recent years’ referred to, concern the work of Andrew Bobeck, who had pioneered magnetic core memories andthen worked on the short-lived ‘Twistor’ memory which was superseded by RAM.
In 1967, Bobeck joined Bell Labs to work on bubble memory. It looked a promising technology for a while.
Intel introduced a 1Mbit bubble memory in the late 1970s, Sharp used bubble memory in an early 1980s portable computer and, in the UK, Plessey was a leading exponent of bubble memory technology.
But the fast increasing density of hard discs, and the emergence of battery-backed CMOS RAM were to eventually kill off any furtehr commercialisation of bubble memories.
TOMORROW: TOP TEN R&D SPENDERS
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