This Title Would Use Up Half The Available Storage All By Itself

I adore "useless" tech ideas . . . so my day was made when I stumbled across an amazingly impractical device. Behold, courtesy of the Adafruit blog: the magnetic-core-memory USB drive!

For those unaware, magnetic-core memory was old-school, hard-wired memory, storing individual 0/1 bits in an intricate array of cores. Wikipedia says they were used from 1955 through 1975 – and, apparently, today.

Created by a techno-wizard known as dydt, the magnetic-core-memory USB drive sports a whopping 128 bytes of data. Each character of this Daily Illuminator post is a byte, so with my discussion of it, we're already over 10 times as much as the thing is capable of storing.

Still, it's a fascinating way to enchant some aged electronics, and I think this gizmo would make a perfect "what the heck" MacGuffin for a steampunk game . . . or a way to back up half a Bluesky post to take on the go.

-- Steven Marsh