‘Hands weaving magnetic-core memory, IBM, Poughkeepsie, New York,’ 1956. Photograph by Ansel Adams.
My mother used to make computer cores as a "work from home" side business. As a child I got spending money via un-winding the ones that failed testing so that the magnetic center could be re-used. I got between $0.05 and $0.25 per core depending. Mom got more for the finished ones, of course, though I don't know how much. Her sister was an expert, and did the more complicated kind, some of which ended up in satellites and/or were used by NASA!
They were all done by hand using a kind of treadle-operated frame with a little (crochet!) hook to pull the wires around the cores. The people making them were mostly housewives who did this as a side-job in the 80s and 90s. I don't know if it's still done that way anywhere in the USA today, but the history of computing and space exploration is littered with "women's work" like this.
As a side note, in 1979, solid state RAM (ie, integrated circuits) cost roughly $150 for 16 kilobytes which is about $680 in 2026 dollaroonies.
Compared to hand-woven core memory, this was a freaking bargain, but it was still brutally expensive compared to other integrated circuits.
I don't know if core memory drove RAM high or that RAM was particularly hard to make compared with other chips.
If solid state RAM was such a bargain and was available, why not use it in NASA designs instead of core memory which was expensive and bulky? Core memory was well-tested and proven to be reliable in space, whereas solid state RAM was not yet and NASA was worried about system failure.
