Thanks for that charming bit of history. Humorous but also astonishing that the cores were salvageable after such rude treatment. The use of such cores was before my time in the computer world so I have no experience with them. I wondered if the tiny cores could have been scooped out of the ashes by a magnet. I'm sure the engineers would have thought of it, I'm guessing that would have damaged them. (Or more likely it wasn't even possible to collect them that way...)

Threading the burnt cores onto needles would definitely not be my idea of fun. Though I imagine a needle full of them would resemble a string of beads. Come to think of it, as described those cores would make a mighty interesting necklace (and FWIW my wife thought so too).