core 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.
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core cancer n.
[rare] A process that exhibits a slow but inexorable resource
leak -- like a cancer, it kills by
crowding out productive `tissue'.