Such memories were used in the 1950s until the 1970s, in the early days of computation. Women recruited from textile factories, valued for their manual skills, hand-wove these memories. Information was stored on ferrite rings woven into a matrix of copper wire. Each core holds a single bit, translating to the digital 0 or 1, depending on its current direction of magnetization. With the right amount of current the direction of magnetization can be changed and thus, information can be stored onto the cores.

As this work was mostly seen as clerical work, little to no accounts from the women themselves were recorded and thus their stories can't be retold and their contribution to development of computation remains unseen. Most of the visual archiving that exists from that time is promotional material in the form images that either cut out the worker entirely, or just exposes their hands (presumingly not even the workers hand, but a model's hands).
Through the act of weaving this memory, the workshop tries to commit to the unseen labor, skill and very precise work these women did. For the span of the workshop it embodies what it meant to work on such a delicate piece of technology.

Accompanying the workshop, I developed a kit to support the participants in weaving their own magnetic core memory and offering a correction to the archival silence. The kit consists of a circular PCB forming the canvas for the memory, several ferrite cores, copper wire, and a manual. The manual shows how to assemble a magnetic core memory with a storage capacity of 64 bit.

A second part of the workshop is the writing and reading of the memory. For this reason a custom PCB was developed. It is equipped with a microcontroller in order to interface with the memory. When attaching the memory onto the PCB, a LED matrix underneath acts as a small display, showing what information is currently stored on each core.

"The operators — assembly" returns to the unseen histories of women in the field of computation, production and development of technologies — the pioneers of our infrastructures' foundations.

Photos: Nevena Savić / Timo Johannes