Bubble Memory - Commercialization

Commercialization

Bobeck's team soon had 1 cm square memories that stored 4,096 bits, the same as a then-standard plane of core memory. This sparked considerable interest in the industry. Not only could bubble memories replace core but it seemed that they could replace tapes and disks as well. In fact, it seemed that bubble memory would soon be the only form of memory used in the vast majority of applications, with the high-performance market being the only one they could not serve.

By the mid-1970s, practically every large electronics company had teams working on bubble memory. By the late 1970s several products were on the market, and Intel released their own 1-megabit version, the 7110. In the early 1980s, however, bubble memory became a dead end with the introduction of higher-density, faster, and cheaper hard disk systems. Almost all work on it stopped.

Bubble memory found uses in niche markets through the 1980s in systems needing to avoid the higher rates of mechanical failures of disk drives, and in systems operating in high vibration or harsh environments. This application became obsolete too with the development of flash memory, which also brought performance, density, and cost benefits.

One application was Konami's Bubble System arcade video game system, introduced in 1984. It featured interchangeable bubble memory cartridges on a 68000-based board. The Bubble System required a "warm-up" time of about 20 seconds (prompted by a timer on the screen when switched on) before the game was loaded, as bubble memory needs to be heated to around 30 to 40 °C to operate properly. Sharp used bubble memory in their PC 5000 series, a laptop-like portable computer from 1983. Nicolet used bubble memory modules for saving waveforms in their Model 3091 oscilloscope, as did HP in their Model 3561 spectrum analyzer. GRiD Systems Corporation used it in their early laptops.