Sharp Magnetic Bubble Memory (1983 - 1986) | Museum of Obsolete Media (original) (raw)

Bubble memory was developed in the late-1960s at Bell Labs and was a magnetic computer memory technology that used a thin film of magnetic material with magnetised areas called bubbles. These magnetic areas could be moved around the film.

Sharp used a removable bubble memory cartridge (the CE-100B) that offered 128 KB of storage in its Sharp PC-5000 portable computer of 1983. With no moving parts, unlike a hard-disk drive the bubble memory cartridge was shockproof. The PC-5000 had no internal floppy disk drive, so the bubble memory cartridge was seen as drive A: by the MS-DOS operating system. Optional dual external 5.25-inch floppy disk drives were available.

The Sharp CE-100B came packaged with reflective silver stickers which were used for write-protection by placing on the corresponding black rectangle on one side of the cartridge. The cartridge also had an in-built temperature protection system that prevented it from operating below 5 °C or above 35 °C.

The Sharp PC-5000 was superseded by the PC-7000 in late-1985 and the PC-7000 did away with the bubble memory slot.

Bubble memory faced competition from the rapid expansion in hard disk drive capacity during the 1980s followed by the introduction of flash memory, and this meant it had mostly disappeared by the end of the 1980s.

Figures

Dimensions: 71.6 mm × 57.9 mm × 11 mm

Capacity: 128 KB

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