Simon Batt
2026-02-02 23:48:00
Summary
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This 1970s tech USB drive uses magnetic-core memory, stores 128 bytes, and is the size of a dinner plate.
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It sports a 32×32 ferrite-core grid (1024 bits); hand-woven wires show vintage craftsmanship.
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It only stores 128 bytes of data — not enough for an OG tweet, but a stunning vintage-tech revival.
Sometimes, when I dig through my old collection of USB sticks, I’ll find one that I purchased in 2008. It’s an old Cruzer Micro that clocks in at 8 GB, with a head that can slide out and a plastic window that glows orange while it’s being read. I paid about $20 for that back then, and it felt like a real futuristic piece of tech. These days, I can spend the same amount of money and get a stick that has 16x the memory of my Cruzer Micro. I don’t want to imagine what 128 GB would have cost me back in the late 2000s.
But what if we went even further back in time? What if, in our little theoretical world, USB drives were around during the 70s? Well, we’ve gotten our first glance into what one might look like, and it’s the size of a dinner plate and stores 128 bytes. Yeah, regular bytes.
A theoretical USB drive from the 70s couldn’t store an OG tweet
But at least it looks really cool
As spotted by Tom’s Hardware, this cool project was the idea of @dydt_Nao on X. It’s a USB-A stick, powered by a Raspberry Pi, designed to use magnetic core memory tech from the 1970s to store 128 bytes of data on it. And, well, just take a look at how big this thing is. Note the USB-A port at the top-left of the first image for a good idea of scale.
Machine-translated, the post reads:
All the parts are finally loaded. It’s got a proper USB-A connector and no matter how you look at it, it’s definitely a USB drive lol
So, how does this thing work? Well, take a look at the middle bit, with all the threads running along the width and height of the square. Those are hand-woven wires leading to ferrite core beads that held 1s and 0s based on their magnetism. Both the width and the height of the square have 32 wires coming off of it, meaning the grid has 1024 points marked with a ferrite core bead each. That’s your 1024 bits of data right there, which translates to around 128 bytes.
As Tom’s Hardware notes, this isn’t enough data to store an original Tweet that hit the max limits that Twitter (now X) used to restrict people to. So you’re not going to store anything on this anytime soon. However, as a revival of old tech, it’s a stunning piece, and I’m glad it got a second life this side of the 21st Century.