And you are here why?

So, way back in the days of yore, memory didn’t come in handy-dandy chips that just plugged in . Memory was an actual thing, with wires and magnets and whatnot. Big and bulky (compared to what we see these days of course!) it was a technological tour-de-force for the time. For a long long period (mid-50s through the mid-70s), one of the predominant memory types was   Core   memory, which used little magnetic rings (or   cores ) as the individual bits. In particular,  Core RAM   used ferrite cores as the bits , with the wires used to magnetize the cores in opposing directions. Depending on the direction that you sent current through the wires, you could set them to be clockwise ( 1 ), or counterclockwise ( 0 ). In fact, one of the first computers I worked on was a   PDP-10 , which used CORE RAM. The thing is, these ferrite cores were brittle, and would would frequently break and fall. The sysadmin would sweep up the broken ones, and throw ’e...