most important change, from the point of view of automation, was the combination of the sense and inhibit wires, eliminating the need for a circuitous diagonal sense wire. With small changes in layout, this also allowed much tighter packing of the cores in each patch.

By the early 1960s, the cost of core fell to the point that it became nearly universal as main memory, replacing both inexpensive low-performance drum memory and costly high-performance systems using