The principle form of electronic MEMORY used in computers prior to the invention of semiconductor memory chips. It consisted of thousands of tiny rings called cores, made from a magnetic FERRITE material and each threaded onto three fine copper wires: the whole formed a two-dimensional mesh much like a knitted textile.
By passing current down the two appropriate vertical and horizontal wires, a particular core could be addressed and its direction of magnetization either read or altered using the third wire, so it behaved as a RANDOM ACCESS memory. The size of its components restricted the amount of core memory that could fit into a computer to thousands rather than millions of bytes.
Dinesh Thakur holds an B.C.A, MCDBA, MCSD certifications. Dinesh authors the hugely popular