Post #1860394

Looking back on this classic, and wow, not many people seem to realise that a good chunk of early computing was literally just doing things with magnets, namely memory technology. Everyone thinks of core memory here (tiny circular magnets woven into a matrix of wires) but there's also stuff like drum memory used in the Bendix G15, which is a gigantic wheel of the stuff cassette tape is made out of! Plus hard drives and diskettes using magnetic flux to store data... nowadays, high quality keyboard switches use the hall effect phenomenon for contactless, hyper-durable switches, which relies on, you guessed it, magnets! But this is a technology that has been around since the 70s at least. Oh and aside from using poisoned semiconductors to convert the sun's photons, if you want electricity, you need to be spinning magnets...