Core Rope Memory (Paperback)

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Core rope memory is a form of read-only memory (ROM) for computers, first used by early NASA Mars probes and then in the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) designed by MIT and built by Raytheon. Contrary to ordinary coincident-current magnetic core memory, which was used for RAM at the time, the ferrite cores in a core rope are just used as transformers. The signal from a word line wire passing through a given core is coupled to the bit line wire and interpreted as a binary "one" while a word line wire that bypasses the core is not coupled to the bit line wire and is read as a "zero." In the AGC, up to 64 wires could be passed through a single core.