2003-05-20

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Molecular Expressions Photo Gallery: The Computer Collection

The photomicrograph below is a close-up of ferrite core memory, an ancient memory architecture that relied on the magnetization of small iron ferrite doughnuts (ferrite cores) to store information. Depending upon the direction of the energizing current, the cores would become magnetized in either a clockwise (0) or counterclockwise (1) direction. When reading the value of the core, the direction of the current was used to determine whether the value of information held by the core was 0 or 1, the binary information used by the computer.