A Survey of Magnetic and Other Solid-State Devices for the Manipulation of Information

A review is made of the art of manipulating digital information by means of magnetic devices. Also included are some remarks on other solid-state devices. There is a brief introductory discussion of semiconductor diodes and of the unique properties of the transistor. The storage and switching capabilities of magnetic cores made of square hysteresis loop materials are discussed with some detail. This discussion includes: random access memories made of individual cores or ferrite apertured plates, various types of decoding and encoding switches, shift registers, current and voltage driven circuits, the principle of current steering, transistor coupled circuits, the principle of the transfluxor, the application of the transfluxor to nondestructive read-out memories and channel commutators, the principle of transfluxor current steering, and some examples of multiapertured transfluxors. The potentialities of some phenomena as yet not widely exploited are discussed: ferroelectric, electro-optical and magnetoresistive effects.