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Core
  • The center region of an optical fiber through which light is transmitted. Note 1: Strictly speaking, in certain cases a significant fraction of the energy in a bound mode does travel in the cladding. Note 2: The refractive index of the core must be higher than that of the cladding. See also cladding, core diameter, fiber optics, normalized frequency, optical fiber.
  • A piece of magnetic material, usually toroidal in shape, used for computer storage.
  • The material at the center of an electromechanical relay or coil winding.
  • n. Main storage or RAM. Dates from the days of ferrite-core memory; now archaic as techspeak most places outside IBM, but also still used in the UNIX community and by old-time hackers or those who would sound like them. Some derived idioms are quite current; `in core', for example, means `in memory' (as opposed to `on disk'), and both core dump and the `core image' or `core file' produced by one are terms in favor. Some varieties of Commonwealth hackish prefer store.