While contemplating the drum's mechanism, Slotnik began to wonder if that was the correct way to build a computer. If the bits of a word were written serially to a single track, instead of in parallel across 40 tracks, then the data could be fed into a bit-serial computer directly from the drum bit-by-bit. The drum would still have multiple tracks and heads, but instead of gathering up a word and sending it to a single ALU, in this concept the data on each track would be read a bit at a time and sent into parallel ALUs. This would be a word-parallel, bit-serial computer.