Magnetic-core memory

Have you ever played with magnets and noticed how they can attract or repel other magnets? Well, imagine if you had lots of tiny magnets all stuck together in a grid pattern. That's kind of what magnetic-core memory is like!

Back in the old days (a loooong time ago), computers needed a way to store information that they could quickly access later. They couldn't use things like floppy disks, USB drives, or the cloud like we do today. So, they used magnetic-core memory instead!

Magnetic-core memory works by using tiny magnets, each one representing a single piece of information, and organizing them into a grid of wires. When an electric current is sent through the wires, it either causes the magnets to flip one way or the other (just like how you can flip magnets using other magnets), or it reads the orientation of the magnets to see what piece of information is stored there.

The magnets are made of a special material that can hold its magnetic orientation even when there's no electricity running through the wires. This meant that once a piece of information was stored in magnetic-core memory, it would stay there until the computer needed it again.

Think of it like a toy box full of magnetic toys. Imagine the toys are all stuck together with tiny magnets, and the box has a grid pattern of compartments to store them in. When you want to play with a certain toy, you can use a special tool to send a signal to the right compartment in the box. This signal either flips the magnet (if you want to store new information) or reads the orientation of the magnet to figure out what toy is stored there.

Magnetic-core memory was used in computers for a long time until other types of memory, like RAM and hard drives, were invented. But we can still learn a lot from magnetic-core memory and appreciate the clever way it stored information using tiny magnets and wires!