In 1975 (I think...) Boise State University upgraded the memory for their IBM 370 from one megabyte to two! The board in question was two feet by 14 inches or so. All of the hardware types in the back room were extremely proud of the new 'toy' and promised 'great things' to those of us pounding away at our model 029 keypunch machines. Not too surprisingly the memory was from this new upstart called 'Intel'!

The first time I found out what a 'core dump' was and its historical significance I was properly amused. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_dump

Oh you kids. I have some core in a drawer somewhere. Yes the cores are very fragile. At this point, just picking it up leaves 'bits of bits' behind.