Considering selling Core Memory

[Gavin Melville]

Hi,

I’m considering selling a large core, and as far as I know the only one of this scale in existence. It came from a ICT (later ICL) mainframe. In 1960 the company that owned the machine upgraded from 200 to 400 CPU registers and paid GBP£ 20,000 for it. This core is the 400 register one, each register being 48 x 48 cores, for a total of 921600 cores. Any advice on what a core like this is worth, and where best to offer it for sale?

https://www.flickr.com/photos/8788341@N05/

 

[Exceter]

Holy cow... I have a couple individual planes from old Russian mainframes that cost about $75 each. The closest I've seen to what you have on eBay are cubes from old Russian mainframes with 9 planes and 512 cores per plane for a total of 4608 cores and even those sell for approximately $500. What you have is worth several thousand bare minimum.

 

[Exceter]

I found this among the eBay sold listings.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-LEC....m46890.l49286

 

[kc8eyt]

Make sure you dump the contents to diskette before selling!

LOL, JK

That is an amazing piece of history you have there. As Exceter stated, core planes are expensive. I paid over $100 even back in the mid 2000's for an example of one for "show and tell" when I was a computer science teacher. I couldn't even begin to imagine what's yours is worth, or for that fact who to approach as a potential buyer. Get it appraised and then donate to a museum maybe?

 

[whartung]

Waiting for the Hackaday project wiring this sucker up to an Arduino to make an LED blinker or something.

 

[thenzero]

Amazing! They have one at the US Space and Rocket center and it’s not nearly that impressive. Of course theirs was used in a Saturn 5 LVDC so guess it’s even… lol

 

[thenzero]

I love these things.

 

[Exceter]

I have the individual plane and the cube(which I don't have) is what the plane came out of. Apparently, there's a guy in Russian who's been taking them apart because he can get more for the individual planes than he can for the entire cube.

 

[agentb]

That cube looks insane. What an interesting piece of hardware/history.