Word: sandia
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Measured against the mammoth computers for which they were designed, the tiny bits of ceramic hardly seem significant. But the memory units developed by the Sandia Corp. of Albuquerque may succeed in teaching man's rapidly evolving mechanical brains how to talk in another mathematical language...
Although binary numbers are remarkably handy, they are also noticeably bulky. Complex computers now need hundreds of thousands of yes-no units before they can be said to have a satisfactory memory. Sandia's memory units should allow considerable shrinkage...
Magnetic Ceramic. The ceramic is magnetized by pulses of electricity, but instead of recording simply the presence or absence of magnetism, the Sandia material responds differently to different amounts of electricity. Two pulses magnetize it twice as strongly as one pulse; three pulses do three times the job. The ceramic is so sensitive that any digit up to nine can be recorded on a single piece...
...Sandia's men are not suggesting that all computers should now be taught to talk and think in decimal numbers, but they are convinced that for certain kinds of machine memory a decimal storage system could save much space and cost. Improved ceramic may soon be able to store more than 9 digits, but even the present wafers have obvious advantages. Stored away in binary notation, the number 99 takes seven memory units (1100011), whatever the memory , is made of-holes in a card or magnetic cores. In Sandia's decimal memory system, it would take only...
Engineer G. Corry McDonald of Sandia Corp., Albuquerque, is sure that an old-fashioned approach will solve the problem of the modern missileman. McDonald's advice to his colleagues: Go back to the launching method used by Jules Verne in his From the Earth to the Moon. Verne's fictional spaceship of 1865 was fired out of a giant cannon-and the shot would have failed, for several reasons. For one thing, air resistance would have slowed the moon-bound vehicle. But McDonald argues for a sophisticated, factual approach to the Verne fiction...