The first computer I used had an architectural maximum of 8192 words, each with 39 bits. Some machines shipped with 4096 words. You can still see and hear one running, an Elliott 803 at Teh National Museum of Computing.
The memory was extremely expensive, since each
bit was
hand made by women ("because they are more dextrous"). I was once offered a job that was something to do with making these memoriies, but the 1kbit DRAMs were clearly the future.
So, what did they look like? I recently bought a cheap and nasty sucking red hot poker, so I've finally got around to desoldering one.
Here's a 1kbit memory from a1972 Olivetti computer. It was originally mounted on its own circuit board, and a single randomly selected bit could be (destructively) read at a time. Writing it back was a separate operation, just like it is with a modern DRAM.

And this is what several bits look like:

The horizontal and vertical wires are the row and coumn wires that select a single core for reading or writing. The diagonal green wire is the sense wire that goes though all cores.
I'll leave anybody interested in the details to do a little googling; I'm not going to (poorly) repeat good material!