We sit with friends at the round glass table. The talk is clever; everyone rises to it. Bees come to the spiral pear peelings on your plate. From my lap or your hand the spice of our morning’s privacy comes drifting up. Fall sun passes through the wine.
‘Hands weaving magnetic-core memory, IBM, Poughkeepsie, New York,’ 1956. Photograph by Ansel Adams.
My mother used to make computer cores as a “work from home” side business. As a child I got spending money via un-winding the ones that failed testing so that the magnetic center could be re-used. I got between $0.05 and $0.25 per core depending. Mom got more for the finished ones, of course, though I don’t know how much. Her sister was an expert, and did the more complicated kind, some of which ended up in satellites and/or were used by NASA!
They were all done by hand using a kind of treadle-operated frame with a little (crochet!) hook to pull the wires around the cores. The people making them were mostly housewives who did this as a side-job in the 80s and 90s. I don’t know if it’s still done that way anywhere in the USA today, but the history of computing and space exploration is littered with “women’s work” like this.
