Magnetic Drum
Drum memory was a magnetic data storage device invented by Gustav Tauschek in 1932 in Austria. Drums were widely used in the 1950s and into the 1960s as computer memory. For many early computers, drum memory formed the main working memory of the computer. It was so common that these computers were often referred to as ''drum machines''. Some drums were also used as secondary storage as for example various IBM drum storage drives. Drums were displaced as primary computer memory by magnetic core memory, which offered a better balance of size, speed, cost, reliability and potential for further improvements. Drums in turn were replaced by hard disk drives for secondary storage, which were both less expensive and offered denser storage. The manufacturing of drums ceased in the 1970s. Technical design A drum memory or drum storage unit contained a large metal cylinder, coated on the outside surface with a ferromagnetic recording material. It could be considered the precu ...
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Optimum Programming
In the history of computing, optimum programming, or optimum coding is the practice of arranging a computer program's instructions in memory so as to minimize the time the machine spends waiting for instructions. It is of historical interest mainly due to the design of many early digital computers. Most early computers used some form of serial memory, primarily delay-line memory or magnetic drums. Unlike the random-access memory of modern computers, words in serial memory are made available one at a time; the time required to access a particular word depends on the "distance" between it and the word currently being read. If a given delay line held ''n'' words, the average time to read a word would be ''n''/2 word times. Without optimum coding, such a machine would spend most of its time