10 Facts About Bubble memory

Bubble memory is a type of non-volatile computer memory that uses a thin film of a magnetic material to hold small magnetized areas, known as bubbles or domains, each storing one bit of data.

Bubble memory started out as a promising technology in the 1970s, offering memory density of an order similar to hard drives, but performance more comparable to core memory, while lacking any moving parts.

The introduction of dramatically faster semiconductor memory chips pushed bubble into the slow end of the scale, and equally dramatic improvements in hard-drive capacity made it uncompetitive in price terms.

Bubble memory was used for some time in the 1970s and 1980s where its non-moving nature was desirable for maintenance or shock-proofing reasons.

Bubble memory is largely the brainchild of a single person, Andrew Bobeck.

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The first was the development of the first magnetic-core Bubble memory system driven by a transistor-based controller, and the second was the development of twistor Bubble memory.

The Bubble memory density of twistor was a function of the size of the wires; the length of any one wire determined how many bits it held, and many such wires were laid side-by-side to produce a larger Bubble memory system.

Better yet, bubble memory devices needed no moving parts: the field that pushed the bubbles along the surface was generated electrically, whereas media like tape and disk drives required mechanical movement.

Bubble memory found uses in niche markets through the 1980s in systems needing to avoid the higher rates of mechanical failures of disk drives, and in systems operating in high vibration or harsh environments.

IBM's 2008 work on racetrack memory is essentially a 1-dimensional version of bubble, bearing an even closer relationship to the original serial twistor concept.