OTOH in the same discussion I mentioned that you could put a few hundred of the DRAM cells in her laptop together end to end and they'd be about as long as a red blood cell and her eyes bugged out and that never gets old.

@doop Show her a picture of core storage, with three wires woven through each tiny core…

@neia @doop Oh yeah! But those I never used—core I used a lot… (Aside: circa 1966, I got a tour on an IBM facility, which had a salt shaker—admittedly, one with larger holes than normal—filled with cores…)

@SteveBellovin @neia @doop I have a 4096 bit core from some old Russian computer.

ALT

@lain_7 @SteveBellovin @neia @doop this is fascinating https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWOxAn3i-f8

@pikesley @lain_7 @SteveBellovin @neia @doop I believe this is a 4K module of core memory. It’s purportedly from one of the Apollo ground computers.

ALT

@maddiefuzz @pikesley @lain_7 @SteveBellovin @neia @doop
That should still be readable.

@zl2tod @maddiefuzz @pikesley @lain_7 @SteveBellovin @neia @doop Of course it's readable! And you can look right inside it with an MRI scanner.

(Ducks and runs.)

@cstross @maddiefuzz @pikesley @lain_7 @SteveBellovin @neia @doop
<shudder>

@cstross @zl2tod @maddiefuzz @pikesley @lain_7 @SteveBellovin @neia @doop

In the BBC Horizon episode "Now the chips are down" (1978) there's a sequence of a chip taken with (I assume) an electon microscope in which the bits are seen changing state