Monolithic Memories

Abstract

Until a few years ago, the term “Magnetic Core Memory” was synonymous for the main memory of a data processing system. Magnetic core memories were the predominant technology for this application, and they have been very successful as such. In the approximately 20 years of their technological existence, their costs have dropped several orders of magnitude, their speed has been improved by at least one order of magnitude, and the energy consumption has been reduced by the same factor. The introduction of powerful application and systems control software which represent the cornerstone of modern data processing was linked directly to the technical capabilities which the magnetic core memories offered to the system designer and computer user. Even today in constructing a software package, the programmer calculates how much “core” he requires for a particular programming section. The name of a technology became the descriptive term for an addressing space or for the physical arrangement of logical information inside a computer memory.